Media Updates
WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Kit Bond, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, today stressed that a Pentagon report confirming that Guantanamo Bay graduates return to terrorism should encourage President Obama to reconsider his plan to prematurely close the terrorist detention facility.
“Sending these terrorists back to the battlefield isn’t an option – because we know Guantanamo graduates go back to the fight,” said Bond. “This latest evidence should be another nail in the coffin of the White House’s premature closing of our detention facility with no plan to deal with the dangerous terrorists housed there.”
For months, Bond stressed the danger of closing our detention facility at Guantanamo Bay without a plan on where to put the terrorists currently housed there. Bond has repeatedly emphasized that these GTMO graduates go back to the fight to kill Americans. A new report obtained by the New York Times confirms Bond’s concerns. Reported in the New York Times, the Pentagon report finds that one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred from GTMO returned to terrorism.
This report comes on the same day that President Obama’s FBI Director, Robert Mueller, told Congress that bringing Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States would pose a number of possible risks – even if they were kept in maximum-security prisons.
