Political Quotes

“I thank, again, the ranking member and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee for their hard work. I want to close with a couple points. I want to, in the interest of clarifying the record, point out, on the heels of the chairman's comments about the Statement of Administration Policy, when it comes to section 1031, the full statement reads: Because the authorities codified in this section already exist, the Administration does not believe codification is necessary and poses some risk. After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country. Second, there are questions that continue to be raised. I want to mention section 1033. The chairman said it is only section 1032 that is the focus of our attention, but there have been questions raised about section 1033. There is language in section 1033 that makes it clear that--we think it makes it clear that there is a provision that requires any receiving country is taking actions ``to ensure that the [detainee] cannot engage . . . in any terrorist activity.'' This is if we are releasing or transferring somebody who is detained. I was in Afghanistan recently, at Bagram prison. We have 20,000 detainees there. There are some who believe section 1033 would restrict us from releasing those prisoners at Bagram as we begin to draw down our efforts in Afghanistan.…”