Mr. Chairman, section 413 prohibits any funds, no matter how small they might be, to renovate or expand any facility in the U.S. for the purposes of housing Guantanamo detainees. The fact is that the Department of Defense does have six facilities where Guantanamo Bay detainees could be held in the United States. Those facilities are currently operating at only 48 percent capacity. Mr. Chairman, if we were to look deeply into this issue of detention at Guantanamo Bay, we would conclude: number one, that this detention facility doesn't meet the standards of justice that our American jurisprudence system demands; number two, the vast majority of people at Guantanamo Bay should have been released. Even the Bush Administration recognized by their actions, that the vast majority of the 779 people that were put there should never have been detained, because they released most of them; number three, the best place for them to be detained and then tried is in the United States; and number four, the continuance of the Guantanamo Bay facility represents an immediate security threat to the United States because it is a rallying cry and a recruitment tool for our enemies. Right now, there are more than a hundred detainees that are protesting what appears to be an indefinite detention the only way they can--through hunger strikes. Thirty-seven of them are being tube-fed through their noses into their stomach. They're held for about 2 hours to make sure that this liquid stuff is digested.…
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