By Tim Scott
Wednesday, November 04, 2015
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to review the detention facilities housing some of
the world’s most dangerous terrorists, as well as to meet the brave Americans
guarding them every day. On the heels of the president’s using Guantanamo as a
major reason to veto the National Defense Authorization Act and continue his
push to transfer these dangerous terrorists to domestic soil, this trip took on
an added level of importance.
After visiting, it is clearer than ever to me that
Guantanamo is the best place on earth to keep these terrorists. These are
al-Qaeda members, terrorist financers, and other highly dangerous people.
So why does the president want to shut it down and have
Congress, as his press secretary Josh Earnest said late last week, “get out of
the way”? Let’s walk through the arguments.
The propaganda
war: Opponents of keeping the detention facilities open at Guantanamo
believe that by closing it, we can stop terrorist groups from using it as a
recruiting tool. This requires you to also believe that any new facility built
would not be held up as a recruiting tool. And if you believe that, I have a
nice, new bridge to sell you.
Here’s what is actually occurring at Guantanamo: 250
assaults on our guards in the past year and a half . . . and absolutely zero
retaliations. Our troops are highly disciplined and dedicated to serving our
nation, and this proves it. This number is rarely reported on, but it tells you
more about what is happening at Guantanamo Bay than anything else.
At the same time, compliant detainees have their own
portable DVD players, wireless headphones, and access to satellite TV and
PlayStation. If they behave well, they can be out of their cells for 22 hours a
day. But that doesn’t make for very good propaganda.
Prohibitive cost:
Folks like to throw out there that it costs $2.4 million per detainee annually
at Guantanamo Bay and that it would be more cost-efficient to close the
facilities and bring these terrorists to domestic soil.
Now anyone who looks at my voting record knows that I am
a strong fiscal conservative. Part of what I dislike about how Congress budgets
is the use of murky numbers and procedures that don’t tell the full story —
Washington math. And Washington math is in full effect on this $2.4 million
number.
As the president rushes to transfer terrorists out of
Guantanamo, of course the per capita cost is going to appear to rise. (It is
also important to note here the 30 percent recidivism rate among detainees who
have left Guantanamo.) The president has sent more than 40 detainees on their
way in the past few years, as part of his political calculations to close the
detention facilities down, and a nice side effect of that is this shiny new
number to throw out.
Second, built into these cost calculations are the
salaries of hundreds of our troops guarding these terrorists. But our armed
forces are not a private industry, and those salaries will not just disappear.
Those troops will just be deployed elsewhere. That’s not actually saving money
— and anyone who wants to save on the backs of our troops is barking up the wrong
tree anyway.
And finally, it does not take into account that we would
need to provide substantial upgrades to existing facilities or build a
brand-new facility to hold these detainees. That would cost untold millions on
its own.
We can hold them
domestically: Here is where the rubber meets the road. There are detainees
who are simply too dangerous to release and whom no country would agree to
accept. So, if you close the Guantanamo detention facilities, you have to move
the remaining terrorists somewhere on American soil. The administration has
already publicly surveyed Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the Naval brig outside
Charleston, S.C., and the supermax facility in Colorado.
We can look at the Naval brig in Hanahan, S.C., as a
prime example of why moving terrorists to domestic soil is not just a terrible
idea but wholly unnecessary. This medium-security facility sits less than two
miles from a residential neighborhood, a elementary school, and a high school;
four miles from the Charleston airport; and 20 minutes from downtown Charleston
— one of the top tourist destinations in the world. It is also near vital
infrastructure such as the Port of Charleston and multiple rail lines.
It simply does not make sense to transfer some of the
most dangerous men in the world here, especially when we consider where they
would be coming from. Guantanamo is surrounded by water, desert, and mountains.
It is incredibly isolated. This is not an accident.
While it is extremely disappointing that the president
has chosen to veto the NDAA in part because of his desire to close the
Guantanamo detention facilities, I have secured commitments from congressional
leadership that the language in the bill regarding this issue will not change.
The men and women serving our nation at Guantanamo are doing an amazing job at
a state-of-the-art facility — one there is no need to replace.
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