WASHINGTON -- U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., filed legislation Wednesday that would cut off federal funds to countries that take responsibility for detainees now housed in Guantanamo Bay if a detainee engages in terrorism again.
The Guantanamo Bay Recidivism Prevention Act of 2015 was co-sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, David Vitter, R-La., and James Lankford, R-Okla. It states that a country would lose U.S. financial support or military exports for five years if a former Guantanamo Bay detainee for which the country has taken responsibility returns to terrorism.
The director of National Intelligence is required by law to issue a public report every six months detailing whether people released from the Guantanamo Bay prison have re-engaged in terrorism.
"We want to use the most powerful tool that Congress has, which is the spending power, to try to ensure that these terrorist detainees do not return to the fight," Cotton said. "It's only reasonable to expect the administration -- if they are going to transfer these detainees, which is not my first choice -- to do so under the strictest of conditions."
The Republican from Dardanelle said countries that take in the detainees need to ensure those conditions are met and the detainees are monitored.
"If they do not do so, they should not be receiving taxpayer dollars," Cotton said.
The most recent National Intelligence report, released March 6, shows that 116 of the 647 released detainees have re-engaged in terrorism, and an additional 69 former inmates are suspected of re-engaging. Only six detainees released after President Barack Obama took office in 2009 have re-engaged, according to the report.
The legislation applies only to detainees transferred after Feb. 1, 2015. Cotton said that gives countries "fair notice" of what will happen if they don't watch the former detainees close enough. He said countries may be reluctant to take on the responsibility.
"I think many foreign governments wouldn't accept them, or at least wouldn't accept them without much stricter terms and U.S. assistance to ensure that they will not return to the fight," Cotton said. "If it has that effect, then that would be a good effect as well."
The prison in Cuba opened in 2002 and currently houses 122 detainees. Some of the men held there have never been charged with a crime nor gone to trial.
Cotton, a former Army captain who served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been vocal about his desire to keep the Guantanamo Bay prison open. In a February Armed Services Committee hearing, Cotton drew attention when he said that he wants the prisoners to either "rot in hell" or "rot in Guantanamo."
Last Friday, Cotton led four Senate freshmen on a tour of the detention center, which he said solidified his feelings.
"It just drove home what a modern, state of the art, humane facility Guantanamo Bay is. Frankly, the detention facilities there were a lot nicer than a lot of the Arkansas jails that I've seen," Cotton said.
During his 2008 campaign, Obama promised to close the prison. The administration has repeatedly said terrorism groups use the facility to recruit new members. Congress has stopped the effort to close the facility and has passed legislation barring Obama from transferring detainees to U.S. prisons. During his State of the Union speech in January, Obama again said the country needs to close the detention center.
At an event Wednesday in Cleveland, Obama said that if he could start his presidency over, he would close the Guantanamo Bay detention center on his first day in office.
"I thought that we had enough consensus there that we could do it in a more deliberate fashion. But the politics of it got tough and people got scared by the rhetoric around it. ... So instead, we've had to just chip away at it, year after year after year," he said.
So far, 647 detainees have been sent either to their home countries or to third-party governments that have agreed to monitor their activity and put safeguards in place to prevent them from re-engaging in terrorism. Measures include denying them passports and prosecuting them. More than 500 of the detainees were released before Obama ordered the facility closed in January 2009, according to the National Intelligence report
The majority of those released are thought to have been sent to Afghanistan (203), Saudi Arabia (123) and Pakistan (63), according to a roster compiled by the New York Times.
Of the 122 remaining detainees, 54 are considered eligible for transfer, 10 are being prosecuted or have been sentenced, and the cases of the other 58 are being reviewed. More than half of the remaining detainees are Yemeni. The Obama administration hasn't been sending detainees to Yemen because the government is fighting against al-Qaida there.
Metro on 03/19/2015