[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 99 (Wednesday, June 12, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4026-S4027]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Guantanamo Bay

  Mr. President, on another matter, I have spoken before about the 
Biden administration's political obsession with closing the terrorist 
detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, even if it means letting 
terrorist butchers plead out of their just desserts and actually return 
to the fight.
  Last month, new reports indicated just how close the President was to

[[Page S4027]]

shipping 11 more terrorists from Gitmo back to the Middle East to a 
country that is reportedly expelling former terrorist detainees into 
the wilds of Yemen; that is, until Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad 
launched their savage massacre of Jews on October 7. Apparently, the 
administration has bowed, at least temporarily, to the political 
inconvenience of releasing radical Islamic terrorists into the wild.
  The American people don't need a barbaric attack on Israel's 
civilians to remind us that radical Islamic terrorists are targeting 
us, murdering our allies, and sowing chaos around the world. The growth 
of terrorist threats worldwide on President Biden's watch is an 
indisputable fact, and his administration's abject lack of a coherent 
counterterrorism strategy is a damning failure.
  The President may have removed the Iran-backed Houthis from the 
terrorist list, but the Houthi terrorists didn't get the memo. The Shia 
Houthi terrorists and the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula Sunni 
terrorists of Yemen are both--both of them--on the march, working to 
extend the chaos and violence Hamas is sowing in Israel and Gaza across 
the entire region.
  The White House may have thought they could maintain shoestring 
partnerships and counter exploding terrorist threats in critical 
regions, but Russia's inroads to supplant U.S. influence in the Sahel 
and North Africa tell a different story. They may have bet the farm 
that over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations could replace an 
active coalition presence in Afghanistan, but the resurgence of groups 
like ISIS-K and al-Qaida suggest otherwise.
  How many counterterrorism strikes has the U.S. military conducted in 
Afghanistan since the withdrawal? The current state of affairs benefits 
those who wish America and our allies harm. From the administration's 
paralyzing fear of escalation to its desperate pursuit of detente with 
the world's top terror sponsor, the status quo gives our enemies cover.
  And had the Biden administration's plan to export another 11 
terrorists from Gitmo actually gone ahead, it might very well have 
swelled their ranks. We don't have to imagine it. We saw what happened 
when the terrorists detained at Bagram Air Base in Kabul were sprung 
loose. We have seen repeated terrorist jailbreaks in Syria as well.
  And in light of recent reporting, we know that 50,000 ISIS suspects 
and their families are detained by U.S.-funded nonstate actors in that 
country, at the epicenter--the epicenter--of terrorist unrest.
  The Biden administration might genuinely believe that outsourcing its 
responsibility to hold and prosecute those who wish America harm would 
be more humane or that it would make America safer, but they would be 
dead wrong on both counts. Relying on proxies to detain tens of 
thousands of low-level suspects in alarming conditions risks inviting a 
whole new generation of terrorists to put America in their crosshairs.
  Administration officials cannot credibly signal virtue by releasing 
hardcore terrorists from Gitmo while quietly relying on proxies to 
detain low-level terrorists in such conditions. The men who await 
justice at Gitmo are the worst of the worst. Recidivism is a serious 
concern. And the Democrats working breathlessly to close America's 
terrorist detention facility don't have a serious plan to address it. 
They make it harder to strike terrorists and harder to detain them at 
the same time. In fact, the administration is now trying to block any 
constraints on their ability to empty Gitmo from the coming year's 
NDAA.
  If any of our colleagues are tempted to indulge the administration's 
obsessive quest, I would encourage them to request briefings on the 
nature of the threat before they do.
  The President's dangerous weakness in the face of hardened killers is 
well documented, and his plan to let some of the masterminds of 
terrorist violence against Americans off the hook is only the most 
enduring example.