Order Of Procedure

Floor Speech

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Mr. CHAMBLISS. Madam President, the assistant majority leader is exactly right. My amendment is going to prohibit any Guantanamo detainee from being brought to the United States. The assistant majority leader made a comment yesterday that he thought it was somewhat foolish on the part of the minority to think this President would even allow terrorists to be brought into the United States. The fact is, this administration is already proposing that some of the terrorists who are held at Guantanamo be brought into the United States and be freed because the court has determined that 17 Uyghurs ought to be free. The administration is talking about freeing those Uyghurs inside the United States.

The press reported this morning that President Obama intends to bring a Gitmo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, to New York to be tried in our criminal courts. I fear this is the start of a long process of transferring detainees to the United States where, I believe, legal technicalities will ultimately allow some of them to be freed into the United States.

The Senate voted yesterday to prevent any detainees from being brought here and has been very outspoken on this issue this week. Despite this, the President has chosen to ignore the will of Congress and bring Ghailani to the United States. Instead, he is acting quickly to bring him here before he signs the supplemental bill into law.

I don't know how the President thinks he can try this detainee in our courts. Ghailani is not just any terrorist. He was a high-value detainee in the CIA's detention. Bringing him into a U.S. courtroom will open a floodgate to challenges on his detention, his treatment, and any evidence obtained from him.

Additionally, if we were able to obtain any evidence on Ghailani from any other terrorists, that information would likely not be admitted in U.S. courts because it would be considered hearsay. If not, the prosecution would be required to bring additional terrorists to New York just to testify in Ghailani's trial. This alone will make a conviction much more difficult.

There is too much at stake to grant the unprecedented benefit of our legal system's complex procedural safeguards to foreign nationals who were captured outside the United States during a time of war. Allowing these terrorists to escape conviction or, worse yet, to be freed into the United States by our courts because of legal technicalities would tarnish the reputation of our legal system as one that is fair and just.

Prohibiting the detainees from entering the United States, as my amendment does--the assistant majority leader is exactly right--is one small step in the right direction.

Further, if these individuals, such as Ghailani, were to be brought to the United States by President Obama to be tried in our article III courts and not convicted, the only mechanism available to our Government to continue to detain these individuals would be via immigration law. However, current immigration laws on our books are insufficient to ensure these detainees would be mandatorily detained and continue to be detained until they can successfully be removed from our borders.

Although I am adamantly opposed to bringing any of these detainees to the United States, and I do not believe the President has independent authority to do so, I do believe we need legislation to safeguard our citizens and our communities in the event they are brought here. To that end, my amendment makes mandatory the detention of any Gitmo detainees brought to the United States.

It is imperative the Senate consider my amendment before the final adoption of this supplemental bill.

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Mr. CHAMBLISS. Madam President, what the Senator from Illinois, who is a lawyer, neglects to mention is the fact that all 347 of the current incarcerated people who have been tried for terrorist acts were arrested under U.S. law. They were investigated by the FBI. They were prosecuted because they were arrested and investigated with that end in mind. Not one single one of those 347 individuals was arrested on the battlefield.

What the Senator is now proposing is that we take all 240 of the confined detainees at Gitmo and give them all of the rights that are guaranteed to every criminal who is investigated and arrested inside the United States as opposed to being arrested on the battlefield. That has never happened before in the history of the United States, and we have had an awful lot of captives on the battlefield.

For there to be any correlation between the 240 detainees at Guantanamo who are the meanest, nastiest killers in the world, getting up every day thinking of ways to kill and harm Americans, and to compare them to the 347 who are now confined after being arrested inside the United States is somewhat ludicrous.

Again, I regret the Senator is objecting to my amendment which would keep those 240 individuals at Guantanamo outside the United States and would ensure that forever and ever they could never be released into the United States. I simply regret he sees fit to object to it.

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Mr. CHAMBLISS. Madam President, I simply close by saying the Senator is exactly right. There are military tribunals set up in Guantanamo today. In fact, those military tribunals had convicted three separate detainees, and the current administration, when they came into office, dropped the pending charges of twenty-some others awaiting trial, thus suspending the military commissions.

These individuals can be tried by military tribunals at Guantanamo. They are in place and ready to go. I would simply urge that is the way these individuals need to be prosecuted and not to be brought to the United States and tried here.

I yield the floor.

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