Press Conference With Senator Sam Brownback And Senator John Barrasso
Press Conference
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SEN. BROWNBACK: Hi, ladies and gentlemen. Senator Johanns is going to join us shortly and Senator Ensign, Senator Barrasso and Senator Johanns went to Guantanamo Bay to the detention facility last Friday and we've got a statement we'd like to make about that and I'd be happy to open it up for questions.
This past Friday, we visited the detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay and after seeing firsthand the facility, I have a much greater appreciation for the detainee mission there.
I am not aware of anyplace in the world that has the capabilities we have developed at Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo has a highly specialized detention system for hundreds of terrorists and replicating it anywhere would be enormously difficult, expensive and, I believe, unnecessary.
About 2,000 personnel make up the Joint Task Force Guantanamo and they manage a detainee population of just under -- less than 300. In addition to a great deal of security, the Task Force also provides first-rate medical services and Dr. Barrasso is going to mention some specifics of what he saw there about that, manages the military commission system and continues to receive useful intelligence information from the detainees.
I think it's key about the military commission system, we have a specialized courtroom that's set up there that costs several million dollars to set. It is a secure facility and can interview witnesses and have them testify from around the world in a secure fashion and this would take multi-millions of dollars to set up anywhere else as well. This would actually slow the military commission process down to move these detainees out at Guantanamo Bay and replicate a facility like the courtroom system that we have already established there and have spent the money to do it.
There is a misperception that what goes on at Guantanamo is nothing different from what goes on at a domestic prison across the United States. This is inaccurate. I've been in many prison facilities in the United States. This is a specialized facility that will require specialized treatment of the detainees.
The differences underscore the reason why detainees should not be transferred to the United States and specific in my home state of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where we do have a military brig should not be considered as an option for the new home for the detainees when they're transferred from Guantanamo Bay.
I visited Fort Leavenworth, the military brig multiple times and I've seen firsthand that is not equipped to handle the detainees' mission. It is not equipped. Period.
I assure you that this is not simply a case of not in my backyard. There is a world of difference between what Fort Leavenworth is designed for and what a detainees' mission entails and on Friday, I saw the difference with my own eyes. Detainees require a unique mission involving unique national security concerns. Such a mission requires unique facilities and unique security arrangements.
I would further say and specific about Fort Leavenworth is there is the Command and General Staff College of the military where we have students from a number of Muslim countries. Several of these countries have already stated to us that they're pulling their students out if the detainees are moved to Leavenworth. That's bad for the mission of the Command General and Staff College and we don't have the facility to house them at Leavenworth.
The detainee situation is one which must be resolved looking at cold, hard facts. I hope that those who believe the mission of Fort Leavenworth and the mission of Guantanamo Bay are similar would take the time to visit both facilities before voting in favor of a detainee transfer.
It is my belief that what we should do this week on the supplemental is have an affirmative vote in the United States Senate, up or down, on whether or not funds should be used in this supplemental to move detainees to the United States. I don't think they should be and I think we should have an actual vote of the United States Senate. Monies could be reprogrammed and I think it would be important for us to send a signal. I'm hopeful that we'd get an affirmative vote in the United States Senate and not move detainees to the United States and I think we should have that vote and do it on the supplemental this week.
With that, I'm going to turn over to Senator Barrasso, as you know, is also a medical physician and was on the trip as well.
SEN. BARRASSO: Thank you. It was fascinating because I wanted to go knowing that we had in the supplemental bill an issue that had to do with money to be used to close Guantanamo Bay. The president, two days after he was sworn in and took the oath of office, signed the order that said that we would close Guantanamo Bay, the prison within a year and those were the plans.
It is a remarkable facility. It really seems to be the perfect facility for these detainees. When there is talk about moving them to the United States, it doesn't seem to be anyone who is stepping up and saying, yes, send them to my community. Actually, there's only one place that's done that so far and that's Hardin, Montana, a town not very far from the Wyoming border in Montana, that they had constructed a for-profit, a private prison there and they don't have any prisoners and they're looking to business and the city council of that community actually made a vote and said, yeah, we want them here. The congressional delegation does not want them in Montana. The people of Montana don't want them in Montana. The people of Wyoming don't want them in our next door neighbor state. The people of Virginia don't want them here, look at Alcatraz and I know that the senators from California do not support that. There is no location in the United States where they want these prisoners, but yet, the facilities they have there is remarkably equipped. It is safe. It is secure. There has been no escapes from that area. And the treatment that these detainees are receiving was surprising to me because it is so good.
We ate a meal that they eat. They had 6,000 calories a day. There's a medical facility and for the 240 detainees who are currently there, there are about 120 medical personnel. There's a full-fledged pharmacy, a full hospital, an operating room with a C arm that can be used, there's an X-ray device that can be used for patients.
This is a full-scale operating room with the kind of equipment that you would expect in a highly qualified and certified hospital in the United States. They get the best of care. You'd be amazed -- al Jazeera television on cable for all of the detainees. They get USA Today, books, there's a library. They have teachers. They get Sudoku puzzles. You'd be astonished at all of the different things that the detainees are receiving.
Amazingly enough, they actually do screening colonoscopies on any of the detainees over the age of 50 who want them. So it is health care at the level that you would want for the people all across this country.
So I looked at this facility and said this is a perfect facility for them and I'm looking at the courtroom, this courtroom has been set up in a special way for the translators. There's an area for, actually, families of the 9/11 victims where they can go and sit in privacy, curtained off, to be able to watch the trials and we had a couple of attorneys on this trip with us who both said that they had not seen anything. This is more than state-of-the-art in terms of the courtroom facilities that are available there. It just seemed to me that if we could take each and every person from America to look at this facility, they'd say this is the right facility and I would challenge the president to go to Guantanamo Bay, look at this facility. Before you make your final decisions and determinations, I think you ought to take a look at this facility and then when you say, well, I want to close it, if you choose to still do that after seeing it, I recommend that you have a specific plan for coming to the Senate and a specific plan to say what you want to do with the detainees, but it shouldn't be bringing them to the United States.
So with that, we'd be happy to answer questions.
Q Senator Brownback?
SEN. BROWNBACK: Yes.
Q (Off mike.)
SEN. BROWNBACK: We have a disciplinary barracks in Fort Leavenworth, it's primarily a medium-security facility, step one is a problem because you've got to have a supermax facility for this. Secondly, we don't have a total exterior fence to the property. It backs up to an urban -- it is part of an urban area in Kansas City. It backs up to the Missouri River. We've got a railroad that runs a train through there about every 15 minutes during the day. All those are easy attack points to have.
You would initially have to mix a civilian detainee population with a military disciplinary barracks, so you've got to empty your military personnel out because under convention, we cannot mix those populations.
You also have just a very pragmatic problem and the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Pakistanis and the Jordanians have already stated they will pull their students from the Command and General Staff College, which is on Fort Leavenworth, if you put them in the disciplinary barracks, which is also there.
The total at Fort Leavenworth -- we can give you the actual number, but it is a small military installation. You don't have the setbacks on it that you do in other places. We don't have a secure courtroom. You would have to replicate and build a secure courtroom to do it. They were telling us there in Guantanamo that was a minimum of $4 million facility that they had there. Those are the initial ones.
The other facilities that you're talking about in the United States, I don't know as well because I haven't been on all of them. You're going to have to in any of those facilities invest several hundred millions of dollars to get them to the same quality and standard that Guantanamo Bay is because that's what we've put in Guantanamo Bay and you're going to have to be able to get it set back, you're going to have to be able to get a courtroom set up and then you're going to have to move a series of really difficult customers, and as the gentlemen told us there, these guys continue to fight in prison.
We've recaptured, the rough number is around 60 on the battlefield and the number two guy in Afghanistan Taliban was released to another country from Guantanamo Bay and he's back on the battlefield. So these are guys you don't want getting freed because they continue to battle even today.
Q Senator Brownback?
SEN. BROWNBACK: Yes, sir.
Q What is it exactly that the Middle East allies -- (inaudible) -- why would they pull their troops out? Why would they pull their students out? What is their objection?
SEN. BROWNBACK: Well, their objection is twofold, one is, they don't think that they should be held period, would be my understanding of their position. Ours is if we release these gentlemen, I use that term, we release these men, we find them back on the battlefield and they want to kill us and they want to kill thousands of Americans.
So a number of Middle Eastern countries are saying they should be put in some sort of court system and released or tried and we're saying if you release them, we catch them back on the battlefield and they want to kill us and they want to kill lots of us. That's the primary difference is that they -- Guantanamo Bay, I think, whether you move them from Guantanamo to anywhere else, their objection will remain the same. The problem with Leavenworth is a number of the future leaders of the military from around the world pass through Leavenworth. We have the Command General Staff College there at any time we've got about 90 countries with officers there, half of which will be flag officers before their career is finished and Islamic countries are saying, we don't want the detainees at the same spot we're training our future military leaders. We'll pull them out. That's what they've stated.
Q But Senator -- (inaudible) -- mutually exclusive, the Arab allies that you're talking about want -- (inaudible) -- talking about that here -- (inaudible) --
SEN. BROWNBACK: I agree with that, but he asked about Fort Leavenworth and I'm just saying, you know, I got started on this because they talked about moving them to Fort Leavenworth and I looked at that and said this doesn't work and the facility there isn't set and then the more you dig into it, the more you really ask the question, why are you closing Guantanamo when you've spent all this money and this effort to set this up and get a process underway that we haven't done before. Because we're used to a criminal court system when somebody violates our law and our land, we know what to do and we're used to having enemy combatants that represent a foreign country, if you're at war with another country, here is the process. We know it. We've got conventions. We've got treaties on that.
What you have is a group that doesn't represent a foreign country that seeks to kill U.S .citizens in a battle -- a war on terrorism that there's not a country that you can go and negotiate with on these individuals.
So you're having to develop in the court system and in our own process, how do you handle people in that category? And unfortunately, this problem is just not going to go away for a period of time.
Q (Off mike) -- said their backyard is okay, provided that the governor and local officials signed off on that and that's a big if, but if it weren't some other state, a Senator from Michigan, a powerful Senator from Michigan said today he was fine with it as long as the governor and local officials signed off and if that were to happen in Michigan, would that be okay with you?
SEN. BROWNBACK: I think it would be a waste of money. I think it would be a big question as to whether you could replicate the facility in Michigan that we have at Guantanamo Bay. I would want military individuals to pass on that statement.
I mean, I understand a Montana town is willing to take them. I am not about to say they should go to that Montana town because they're willing to take them. Just the same as we released a number to other countries that we've then recaptured on the battlefield.
So you can't just release them to any country either. It is a quagmire and I think the real thing for us to do here is to work together on this without creating artificial deadlines for closing Guantanamo Bay, and I think that's the real way to work through this and with the primary issue being the security of the American people, not some public relations statement in Europe or other places around the world.
That's the primary issue that we've got to address.
Q (Off mike.) Are you satisfied with a military tribunal -- (inaudible) -- detainees are getting at Guantanamo?
SEN. BROWNBACK: I was pleased to see President Obama engage the military tribunals. I think that was a right decision for him to do. I don't have a particular problem with the additional requirements that he puts in it, and I do think that is the more appropriate spot to deal with the problem that is, really, neither of the systems that we have in place. You've got to make a different system in a different way and that's what we've had difficulty and been back in forth to the Supreme Court trying to figure out and at the same time, keeping our eye on the ball, which is keeping the American people safe.
That's the central point here is to keep the American people safe and yet get this into a process and in a system that you can get some sort of adjudication procedure moving forward. So I think the military commission is the right route to go and they're set up to handle it at Guantanamo Bay and you're actually going to slow the process down if you move these detainees to another spot, rather than using what's already been constructed and put together and is set to go at Guantanamo Bay. You'll slow it down.
Good. Thank you all very much.
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