WILMINGTON, Del. – U.S. Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released the following statement Friday night after returning from U.S. National Station Guantanamo Bay.

“Having spent today with a bipartisan delegation of senators reviewing detention facilities on the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, I first want to express my sincere gratitude to the men and the women of the Department of Defense who are performing a difficult, yet crucial mission there under very trying circumstances. It was reassuring to see that the detention facilities there are humane, modern, and secure. They appear to comply with or exceed international standards and the expectations that Americans have regarding domestic detention facilities.

 

“I continue to believe in the goal of closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, if we can do so in a way that both respects American security and our values. I am concerned that the myth of Guantanamo Bay is a powerful recruiting tool for jihadists around the globe, despite the extensive efforts of our military to ensure fair treatment of those detained. The $450 million annual price of detention operations on the base is also too high during a time of fiscal austerity.

 

“I am also struck, however, at the complexity of the task that we face in trying to end detention operations on the base. The detainee population is a mix of high-value detainees, along with mid- and low-level unlawful belligerents. Some can be prosecuted through the military commissions established there, though the pace of such prosecutions is haltingly slow. Others are committed jihadists, yet the presentation of formal war crimes charges against them remains impractical. Still others can be repatriated or transferred to third-party countries, but only if any future threat to our nation’s security can be resolved. For the foreseeable future, we are likely to need to detain dozens of these individuals to prevent them from returning to the battlefield, and have no credible pathway to prosecution.

 

“A current barrier to the closure of Guantanamo are policy riders in the National Defense Authorization Act, which forbid the President from transferring any Guantanamo detainee to the U.S. for any purpose, whether it be for trial, prosecution before a military commission, or continued indefinite detention.  For those of us who are serious about concluding our terrorist detention mission on Guantanamo, we must reconsider modifying these congressional policies to ensure our continued security, while also reducing the potency of Guantanamo as a rallying cry for terrorists and a cause for international criticism.”