The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said the administration is tricking countries into accepting Guantanamo Bay detainees by downplaying their risk in order to close the facility.
Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., said a congressional investigation found that the administration set aside intelligence assessments and wrote that there was “no information” linking some detainees to terrorism to convince countries to take them.
“No information? They were known to have been hardened al Qaeda fighters involved in forging documents, trained as suicide bombers, fighting at Tora Bora, committing mayhem, committing murders in Afghanistan,” Royce said Wednesday at a hearing about a previous transfer to Uruguay.
Royce also said that many of the countries that agree to receive transfers are underprepared and lack the intelligence and security capabilities necessary to prevent the detainees from joining terrorist groups upon their release. One example Royce gave is Ghana, which received two detainees in January.
“The fact is that their leaders have many, many challenges in Ghana facing them every day, so I’m going to guess that tracking and monitoring former Guantanamo detainees isn’t a priority,” Royce said.
Lee Wolosky, the special envoy for Guantanamo closure at the State Department, said the administration only transfers detainees to countries with which it has worked out a security agreement.
“No transfer occurs unless we are confident in security assurances we’ve received,” he said at the hearing.
Wolosky also said that the administration is “very pleased” with Ghana’s implementation of its security agreement, but declined to go into any details in an open setting.
Officials are set to provide a classified briefing to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in a closed setting next month.
The administration released its plan to close Guantanamo Bay this year, but faced backlash from Capitol Hill over the lack of specifics. The plan says the detainees who can not be transferred must be moved to the U.S., and provides some cost estimates based on site visits, but does not recommend a specific location.
Republicans also largely say detainees should not be released because of the chance that they’ll rejoin the fight upon their release.
About 8 percent of those released under the Obama administration are confirmed or suspected of re-engaging in terrorism because of strict standards for releases. Overall, the rate is 31 percent.
Royce, however, said it takes four years to confirm a detainee’s return to battle, and suggested the numbers under Obama could go up.
Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., said he understands the visceral reaction, especially as a New Yorker, to say the U.S. should lock these men up and throw away the key, but that doing so “does not make us safer and sullies who we are as a country.”
“When we went to school and learned about rights and the Constitution, this was never allowed,” the ranking member said.
