Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I support the provisions in this bill relating to the Guantanamo detention facility, or Gitmo, and oppose the amendment to strike those provisions and to reinstate existing restrictions on the transfer of Gitmo detainees. Gitmo is expensive, inefficient, damaging to U.S. international standing, harmful to our allies' ability to cooperate with us, and serves as a recruiting tool for extremists. It is not needed to secure people who should be detained and should be tried. There are other places for detention and for trial in front of a military tribunal. We don't need Gitmo to stay open at a huge expense in order to do that. The bill before us makes long overdue fixes to our ability to transfer detainees out of Gitmo, provide our military with needed flexibility to determine how long we need to detain individuals now held at the Guantanamo facility, and where we should hold them. For a number of years now, Congress has enacted legislation eliminating that flexibility and requiring we continue to hold all Gitmo detainees at Guantanamo whether or not it is in our national security interests to do so. The current law establishes an absolute ban on bringing any Gitmo detainee to the United States for any purpose, including detention, trial, incarceration, or even medical treatment.…”