[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Pages 3667-3668]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             WAR ON TERROR

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, earlier this year I noted that the next 
Commander in Chief will assume office confronting a complex and varied 
array of threats. I observed that after 7 years of the Obama 
administration delaying action in the War on Terror, the next 
administration would need to return to the fight and restore our role 
in the world. Among many other things, that means we must return to 
capturing, interrogating, and targeting the enemy in a way that allows 
us to defeat terrorist networks because let's remember that during his 
first week in office, the President issued a series of Executive orders 
that collectively undermined the capability of our intelligence 
community and military to combat terrorism.
  Yesterday the Defense Department confirmed that two of Al Qaeda's 
former explosives experts were transferred from the secure detention 
facility at Guantanamo Bay to Senegal. Both detainees had long records 
of supporting Al Qaeda. According to records that have been made 
public, one of those detainees, a former associate of Osama bin Laden, 
is likely to reengage

[[Page 3668]]

in hostilities. The other detainee was previously assessed as likely to 
return to the fight. This comes at a time when Al Qaeda in the Arabian 
Peninsula has exploited the war in Yemen to secure a safe haven and the 
al-Nusra Front within Syria is exploiting the civil war there to carry 
on Al Qaeda's mission. This is precisely the wrong time to send 
experienced, hardened fighters back into the conflict.
  We must use the remaining months of the Obama administration as a 
year of transition to better posture our military to meet the threats 
we face, not make it more challenging for the next President, 
regardless of political party. Actually, there have been encouraging 
changes within the administration recently, such as programs presented 
in the budget request by the Secretary of Defense to address Chinese 
and Russian aggression, a public recognition by the Chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of the threat posed by ISIL in Libya, more focus on the 
need to rebuild a nuclear triad, General Campbell's statement that a 
larger force must be left in Afghanistan, and the deployment of the 
expeditionary targeting force to Iraq. This is the wrong time for the 
administration to release terrorists who are likely to return to the 
fight.

                          ____________________