Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 5 minutes. The gentleman from Virginia described very well the process that the Obama administration put in place in 2009. It was a significant improvement. The real problem that we had with Guantanamo was, when it was originally conceived as a place to hold detainees under the law of war, there were, at one point, nearly 800 detainees there. A lot of them were brought there without much in the way of vetting or assurances that they were, in fact, threats. In fact, under the Bush administration, well over 500 of those detainees were released, and there really wasn't much of a process. Somewhere in the neighborhood of over 20 percent of those detainees did return to the battlefield and did present a threat to the country. There simply wasn't a process. So, as Mr. Forbes described quite well, in 2009, the Obama administration put in place a process. At the time, there were 242 detainees remaining in Guantanamo Bay. The process they put in place was to go through every single one of them and say: Who are these people? What is their threat level? They evaluated all of them and put them into different categories. They determined that some were not a threat and could be released.…”