Chairman Royce Statement on Latest GITMO Release
Washington, D.C. – House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) released the following statement in response to the Obama administration’s announcement that it has released a Guantanamo Bay detainee to Montenegro:
“The troubling trend continues. In the president’s mad dash to close the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, dangerous jihadists are being released to foreign countries that are ill-equipped to handle them. And all the while, the administration refuses to tell the American people the truth about what’s really happening.
“More than a month has passed since I asked the Departments of Defense and State to explain glaring contradictions between their public testimony about detainee transfers and their own classified assessments. The silence is deafening. Especially since news reports now indicate that at least 12 former Guantanamo Bay detainees have returned to battlefields to kill Americans. And last Friday, we learned that one jihadist released to Uruguay has gone missing in Brazil – just weeks before the Olympic Games.
“Clearly, the president is determined to empty out the prison at Guantanamo Bay with no regard for national security or Congress. This is totally unacceptable. The House Foreign Affairs Committee is determined to expose the truth about the administration’s actions that are putting American lives at risk.”
NOTE: In a March 23 hearing, the administration flat-out denied that it had ever knowingly transferred a detainee to a country that could not handle the detainee. A thorough Foreign Affairs Committee review of the administration’s own classified assessments determined this is not true.
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