By Chris Casteel
Rep. Steve Russell, after touring the military prison at Guantanamo Bay over the weekend, praised the operation of the facility and acknowledged the complexity of dealing with the remaining detainees.
"There's a lot of legal problems back and forth, but the president has to get involved with how these things are adjudicated,'' said Russell, R-Oklahoma City.
"People say, 'Just close it all down.' But they have to go somewhere."
What members of Congress don't want is for the detainees to go to prisons on U.S. soil.
The military prison, which began taking prisoners in 2002, now has 116 detainees, about half the population in 2009, when President Barack Obama took office.
The administration has transferred many of the detainees to their home countries or other countries willing to take them. Last month, six detainees from Yemen were transferred to Oman.
"There's still a lot of bad dudes at the place, in fact most of them at this point,'' Russell said.
Some al-Qaida members who helped plot the 9/11 bombings and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole have been charged by a special military commission after years of legal wrangling and are expected to be tried.
Russell, a retired U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq, said the mission of holding suspected terrorists "has to be done somewhere," and he praised the military personnel at the prison.
"The discipline they have, the vigilance they have, how they will just not take the bait of these terrorists who want to very much remain in the fight.
"(Detainees) want to try to get a guard, they want to defame the guard, they want to do anything they can to stay in the fight."
Obama promised in his first campaign that he would close the facility because of the allegations of torture and the legal questions about holding prisoners without charges or legal representation.
The U.S. Supreme Court has given the inmates some legal protections. The ongoing fight between Congress and Obama is over moving the prisoners to U.S. military prisons so the facility can be closed.
Congress has barred the administration from doing that, and both houses extended that prohibition in defense bills approved this year.
Russell said it will cost nearly $400 million this year to keep the prison open and pay for all the related costs.
"It's not going to be cheap no matter what you do,'' he said.
"You can't put these people in a general population in prison -- even for their own safety, as ironic as that might seem."
He said the detainees "have to be dealt with. If you bring them on the shore, then they're afforded rights that go way beyond the scope of committing acts of a warfare nature.
"So it is complicated."
Also on the trip with Russell were Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., and District of Columbia Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat.