Political Quotes

On the recordJuly 12, 2017
It costs the American taxpayer $10 million a year per detainee to keep a detainee in Guantanamo. To keep that same detainee in a Federal maximum security penitentiary in the United States would cost $78,000. That is a ridiculous waste of our military budget. Nobody has ever escaped from a Federal maximum security prison. {time} 2115 Transferring these prisoners to Federal maximum security prisons in the United States would pose no danger to anybody. And yes, some of these prisoners may be the worst of the worst. Many are not. They were not all caught on the battlefield. Some of them were sold for bounties by people in different tribes or groups in Afghanistan. Some of them were not captured on battlefields at all. Some of them are innocent; some are not. But to keep them in Guantanamo for $10 million each per year with no possibility of getting out is an affront to our values. It is an affront to our liberties. It is an affront to our military budget and to our pocketbooks, and it is, frankly, plain foolish. I yield back the balance of my time.
Said by
Jerry Nadler
Democratic · New York

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