Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2009

Floor Speech

SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2009 -- (Senate - May 19, 2009)

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Mr. BENNETT. Madam President, I rise to thank the chairman of the full committee, along with the ranking member, for their wisdom with respect to the money allocated for Guantanamo Bay and the prison there. I want to make a few comments with respect to the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

I have visited the prison at Guantanamo Bay. I led a CODEL--for those watching on television, that means a congressional delegation--of myself, members of the House, and, on this occasion, I took some members of the European Parliament. That is interesting, because when we came back and held a press conference to report what we had found, members of the European Parliament on the CODEL said, ``We cannot participate in this press conference.'' I said, ``Why?'' They said, ``If we told the truth about what we saw at Guantanamo, we could not go home to Europe. The animosity toward Guantanamo in Europe is so strong that if we told the truth about how good things are down there, we would be attacked politically in Europe and we would lose our seat in the European Parliament.''

I said: Well, I don't want you to lose your seats in the European Parliament. I won't ask you to participate. But we did hold a press conference, and one of those who did participate said: I wish the prisons in my district back home were as good as the prison in Guantanamo.

Let me describe what we found in Guantanamo, not with respect to how well the prison was designed or how well the prison was administered but who the prisoners are, or, as they are appropriately called, the detainees.

If you talk to the detainees, every one of them is a goat herder picked up by accident by the American troops when they were in Afghanistan or in Iraq or wherever it was. None of them had any connection with al-Qaida at all. This was all a huge mistake.

I have been in the storeroom where they keep all of the items that were taken from these detainees when they were picked up. The question arises: What is a goat herder doing with hundreds of dollars of American money in $100 bills? What is a goat herder doing with sophisticated explosive equipment in his back sack? What is a goat herder doing with forged passports and other information and documentation? Maybe these people are not all goat herders. Maybe these people really are connected with al-Qaida, just based on what they found.

I have watched an interrogation take place at Guantanamo by closed-circuit television. The interrogation room is one which has stuffed furniture, pleasant surroundings. The detainee, to be sure, has irons on his legs so that he cannot leave his chair where he is sitting. They are not tying him directly to the chair, but he couldn't get up and walk out. But he is sitting on the chair, and the interrogator is sitting across the room in another chair, and they are having a pleasant conversation.

You say: What kind of an interrogation is this? The interrogation is a conversation, and it goes on for an hour, an hour and a half. Then next week there is another conversation that goes on for an hour, an hour and a half, 2 hours, whatever it might be. Out of those conversations, little items begin to slip from the mouth of the detainee. The interrogator is able to take those items and piece them together, and pretty soon, after a few weeks or maybe a month or two, the interrogator knows that goat herder A has just identified goat herder B as an explosives expert high in the level of al-Qaida. Then, based on that information, when goat herder B is in for his interrogation, there is a conversation, and another thing starts to slip. Over a period of months, a pattern of information emerges that makes it possible to identify who is what and where in the whole al-Qaida operation.

Understand, the interrogation is not Soviet style to try to beat a confession out of anybody. It is to find out information that can be used in the war against terror. This information is painstakingly put together over a period of time. Pretty soon, the pattern emerges, and the interrogators begin to understand who these people are, what their relationship to each other may be, and what their role was out on the battlefield.

One of the things I had not realized until I got there was that as a result of this process, the determination has been made with respect to hundreds of these detainees that they are no longer dangerous, they no longer have any information we need, they are no longer in a position to be dangerous to the United States. When that determination is made, they are released.

Hundreds of the detainees at Guantanamo have been released. Many of them have showed up again on the battlefield. Indeed, some of them have been killed by American troops on the battlefield as they have been fighting back, which means the interrogators who decided they were no longer dangerous made a mistake. It turns out they really were dangerous, they really were connected at a higher level than we were able to determine through the interrogator, and they had fooled the interrogator into believing they were innocent bystanders who somehow did not belong there, and they got released and found their way back to Afghanistan, back to the battlefield. Some of them whom we knew well enough from their time in Guantanamo identified on the battlefield were shot and killed by American forces in firefights where they were attacking Americans.

One of the things they do at Guantanamo--``they'' being the detainees--is to make every effort to communicate with each other and create conspiracies within the prison. Conspiracies to do what? Conspiracies to create incidents that will create international outrage against the United States.

Two weeks before we arrived there, there was one such incident. I had not seen it in the American newspapers. I was told that it was reported in the American newspapers but only in passing. When we got the details from the guards and the administrators of the prison describing the specifics of what had happened, I realized that the story in the American newspapers was very sketchy.

Over a period of months, the detainees conspired together to create an incident in the area that was part of the exercise facility. They planned it very carefully. They worked together. They complied with all of the rules in the prison that would allow them greater freedom because as the commandant of the prison said to us: I don't have very many sticks; I only have carrots.

To get people to cooperate, if they abide by the rules they lay down, we give them greater freedom, we give them greater opportunities. So these people would comply in every way until they could get to a circumstance where they could talk to each other, be on the exercise field, and hatch their plan.

Finally, this is what they did. They put up some screens in the form of clothing or some kind of cover so that the guards, for a short period of time, could not see what they were doing in this room. In that period of time, they pulled down the fluorescent tubes from the light fixtures in the ceiling so that they could use them as weapons. At the same time, they covered the floor with a variety of liquids, their purpose was to make the floor as slippery as possible. Then when the guard came in to see what was going on because the screens had gone up, as he walked in, suddenly he was standing on liquids that were slippery so that he couldn't get his footing very well, and they were attacking him with the fluorescent tubes as weapons, trying to create a significant incident. Fortunately, he was able to keep his footing. He was able to pull out his weapon. He was able to gain control of the situation, and the rest of the guards were alerted fast enough to come in before it turned into serious injury. But the American guard came very close to serious injury.

Their hope was, as nearly as the interrogators could figure out, to provoke the Americans into killing one of them. Their hope was to create a circumstance where there would be a death in Guantanamo that would create a worldwide outcry of outrage against the brutal Americans in this prison and thereby make their political point.

There were many other examples which were given to us of attacks on the guards by the prisoners in circumstances, again, that are not appropriate to discuss in this setting but that are thoroughly disgusting and outrageous in terms of the violation of the person of the guards involved.

On one occasion where it was particularly outrageous, it was a young woman who had joined the Navy and was in her first assignment doing her best to patrol up and down an aisle between the cells. In this case, the cells had screens on them through which items could be thrown. They were thrown at her and in her face.

Their commanding officer said to her: Go take a shower and take the afternoon off, to recover from this horrendous kind of experience for her.

She said: I will take the shower, I will get a clean uniform, but I will come back. I will not let them intimidate me to say I can no longer walk my patrol.

That is the kind of valor and integrity we have from the Americans who are there policing these people.

I could go on about other things we discovered. The primary health care problem the detainees have in Guantanamo is obesity. They are fed so well and they have no control on how much they eat; they can use whatever they want from the food as they come into the commissary. The doctors and the nurses who are there to take care of them say we have a problem of overweight with every one of them. They have never had this much food available to them in their lives.

They are all looked after. Many of them came with significant health care problems off the battlefield, and it is the American medical corps that has made them well and whole.

Why do I dwell on all of this about the nature of the prisoners? Because I am sympathetic with those Americans who say: We don't want these people in our prisons. And indeed we don't--not because of a ``not in my backyard'' syndrome, but guards who are trained to deal with the kinds of prisoners who show up in American prisons now are not prepared to deal with people who are potential suicides to make a point, people who will deliberately provoke the guard in the hope that they will get killed or seriously injured in order to make an international incident. This is not your average automobile stealer. This is not even your average drug dealer. This is someone who has a political agenda and sees the prison in America as the stage on which that agenda can be acted out. To put that prisoner into an American prison where they are going to be rubbing shoulders with other convicts who have absolutely no idea what they are getting into and call upon guards to deal with them who have no idea what they are getting into is seriously not a good idea.

Where do you keep people like this? You keep them in a facility that is designed to deal with them. You keep them with guards who are trained to deal with them. And you use the facility to get the information they can give you to be helpful in the war on terror. That is what the prison at Guantanamo was built to become, and that is what it is.

If the President of the United States now decides that keeping Guantanamo open is a political embarrassment with other countries in the world and it becomes necessary for us in our diplomacy to close Guantanamo, I say that is his decision. The Constitution gives him the responsibility of foreign affairs, and I will respect that decision. But as a Member of the Congress, I don't want to fund that decision until I know what he has in mind as an alternative place to put them. The idea of breaking them up and scattering them around the United States and letting them go to ordinary prisons--be they Federal, State, or local--in the United States is to ignore who they are and ignore what they can do and ignore the challenge they represent to law enforcement and penitentiary personnel in America's existing prisons.

So that is why I applaud the chairman in his decision to say we are going to put this off. We are going to delay the time when Guantanamo will be closed until we have a logical place to put them.

Because right now, if you want to describe the logical place to put these prisoners at this time, in this particular struggle with al-Qaida and the rest of the terrorists, the logical place is where they are right now. If it means keeping Guantanamo prison for an extra year or an extra 2 years or whatever it takes to get an intelligent alternative, I say, let's do that. Because the intelligent alternative does not exist at the moment.

I hear no plans being drawn to create it in the future. I think we owe it to those Americans who would otherwise have to deal with it if the U.S. Navy doesn't, to say we are not going to turn them over to you until you have a legitimate and well-thought-out plan as to the way to deal with it.

It is for that reason, again, that I congratulate the chairman and the committee on the decision to withhold this funding until such a plan has been made available to us.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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