On the recordJuly 12, 2017
I will not take 5 minutes. This amendment will strike section 1023 of the bill that prohibits the use of funds to construct or modify facilities in the United States for Guantanamo detainees. The provision is simply designed to further delay the transferred detainees out of Guantanamo and is unnecessary and counterproductive. The arguments for this amendment and against it are essentially the arguments for and against the previous amendment that we just went through. That amendment prohibited the use of funds to transfer prisoners. This amendment prohibits the use of funds--this provision, rather, prohibits the use of funds to construct facilities in the United States to receive such transferees. It is essentially the same pros and cons. I just want to mention, though, that yes, some of those detainees may be the worst of the worst, but they will still be detained. But some of them are not. They are people who were caught up in bounty situations where they were sold for money because we were giving a bounty if someone claimed that so and so had been in combat against us, but we didn't really know. We now know mistakes were made. We may choose to say some of these people can go home, and others can stay in the United States. It is simply, again, a question that we shouldn't be spending $10 million a person, instead of $78,000 a person, to hold them in secure facilities. The other thing that Ms.…
