[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 25 (Tuesday, February 8, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Page S550]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                  ISIS

  Mr. President, now, on another matter, last week, the U.S. military 
took another top terrorist leader off the battlefield. This particular 
leader had been ISIS's top militant since 2019, when American special 
operators introduced his predecessor to a similar fate.
  I am proud of our special operations personnel who took on this 
dangerous mission. President Biden deserves credit for making the tough 
call to send U.S. servicemembers into harm's way.
  Until this terrorist chose to kill himself and take innocent citizens 
with him, their mission had been to capture him alive for 
interrogation. That is an encouraging sign. If the past 20 years of 
counterterrorism have taught us anything, it is that just taking out 
top leaders does little to uproot their networks. This terrorist could 
have been a source of valuable information for destroying ISIS.
  But this aspect of last week's mission also raises a question for our 
Commander in Chief. If President Biden recognizes the value of 
detaining top terrorists, then why are his staff still caught up in the 
longstanding liberal obsession with shutting down our detention center 
at Guantanamo Bay?
  The White House said last year that closing Gitmo was ``certainly our 
goal and our intention,'' but last week, U.S. forces undertook this 
mission that was designed to take this terrorist murderer alive for 
detention and questioning. So how exactly was the Biden administration 
planning to square their political quest to close Guantanamo with their 
stated intention to capture this terrorist alive? Where were they 
planning to house this killer--a Holiday Inn? Did they intend to turn 
this guy over to a nonstate, third-party partner like the Syrian 
defense forces? That would have created new risks of another major ISIS 
prison break. And would his jailers have obeyed the Geneva Conventions? 
What if the Syrian regime--itself a state sponsor of terror--retakes 
that part of Syria? Or was the administration planning on bringing him 
before U.S. courts, under article III of our Constitution? Did the FBI 
come along on the raid to read this foreign terrorist his Miranda 
rights? Was their plan to eventually give this sworn killer the same 
rights as U.S. citizens and risking the possibility of a jailbreak 
attack on our own American soil? Or perhaps the correct answer--
Guantanamo Bay--was their plan all along. Maybe the Democrats' virtue 
signaling about closing this important facility has finally given way 
to reality.
  Guantanamo is a highly secure, humane, and entirely legal place to 
detain terrorists. It would have been the safest place to interrogate 
this terrorist, well within the bounds of the laws of war.
  Any Democrats who want to shutter it should look closely at the 
reality of the Syrian defense forces' makeshift prisons, like the major 
jailbreak by hardcore ISIS figures that just happened in Hasakah. They 
should remember the massive ISIS prison break when the Taliban overran 
Bagram in Afghanistan.
  So if President Biden is pumping the brakes on his own plans to close 
Gitmo, he should say so, and I will be the first to applaud him. If he 
isn't, he owes the country some answers about his intentions with last 
week's raid and our national security going forward.
  September 11 taught us definitively that we cannot treat terrorism as 
merely a law enforcement challenge. I hope and pray it does not come to 
pass that this administration is forced to relearn that lesson the hard 
way.
  This war against terrorists will not end simply because we hope it 
ends. It will require sustained pressure to keep our enemies off 
balance.