Sen. Tom Cotton warned the president on Tuesday that transferring Guantanamo Bay detainees to the U.S. would be bad for both national security and the prisoners themselves.
The Arkansas Republican said detainees at a military prison in Cuba have access to specialized medical care, up to 12 hours of recreation a day, academic classes and religious services. It’s a much better quality of life than they would see in a supermax prison in the U.S.
“Their relatively cushy treatment would likely be much more circumscribed,” Cotton, a former Army infantry officer, said during an event at the Heritage Foundation.
President Obama promised when he took office that he would close the military prison within one year, saying that it was too expensive and was being used as a recruitment tool by terrorist groups. He ran into trouble, however, when Congress passed restrictions on transferring detainees that made it more difficult to close the prison.
Now, Obama is racing to deliver a plan to Congress to transfer those prisoners who have been cleared to other countries and move those who can not be released to a facility in the U.S.
There are 107 detainees at the military prison. The administration has already transferred 20 prisoners this year, according to data compiled by the New York Times.
Teams from the Pentagon have visited military and federal prisons in Kansas, South Carolina and Colorado over the past couple months to fill in cost details on the plan to Congress, but have faced pushback from lawmakers who don’t want terrorists housed in their home states.
The new defense authorization act signed last month requires him to submit a plan to Congress by February.
Cotton said it would cost nearly $1 billion to construct a new facility and retrofit current prisons to hold Gitmo detainees.
In addition to the cost to taxpayers, Cotton said it would also harm America’s national security to have terrorists within the country. One of the greatest risks, he said, is that terrorists will spread their message and radicalize hardened criminals if kept in the same facilities.
Once those criminals are released, they could carry out attacks against the homeland or spread the radical Islamic message to other prisoners while still incarcerated.
“In the end, moving Guantanamo detainees to the United States will create a federal prison population that is more dangerous, more jihadist and much more costly to keep locked up,” he said.
The U.S. prison system is stretched nearly to capacity with only U.S. criminals. Cotton also worried that, to make room for Gitmo detainees at the most secure facilities, other dangerous criminals would need to be relocated to less secure prisons.
Cotton said that a wartime prison is the “unpleasant, but inescapable result of any conflict,” and said that it will be closed when the war is over. But, especially with the rise of the Islamic State, the untraditional, long war against Islamic extremism is still raging and a number of those who have been released are suspected of engaging in hostilities against the U.S. after being transferred.
“It has always been set for closure once hostilities end, but unfortunately, those hostilities have not ended. In fact, they have intensified,” he said. “We remain engaged in a long war.”
