Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., right, discusses the Guantanamo Bay detention facility at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington on Tuesday.
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s renewed calls for Congress to approve closing the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay would be a national security mistake, undermining the nation’s ability to gather critical information about terrorist plots and targets, House Intelligence Committee member Rep. Mike Pompeo said Tuesday.
“There is still important information being [found] there. I absolutely believe Guantanamo Bay should remain open,” Pompeo, R-Kan., said. “We should continue to use it as the enormously important American asset it is.”
Pompeo, who recently returned from a trip to the Guantanamo base said “America would not be safer and would be no more moral” if the facility, which holds an estimated 160 detainees, was shut down.
“I saw a detention center run by integrated military command that was as well run as any federal prison I have ever been to,” he told a crowd at the conservative think-thank American Enterprise Institute.
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has for years been dogged by revelations of torture and the mistreatment of detainees. The latest human rights concern involves the force-feeding of inmates who are on a hunger strike.
A May 13, 2013 letter written by the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch and more than 15 other human rights groups called on Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to “end the force-feeding of competent hunger-striking prisoners…. which constitutes cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
“We also urge you to investigate and address recent allegations of the use of excessive force, isolation, temperature manipulation and forced sleeplessness in Guantanamo,” the letter said.
Obama has stated his desire to close the facility.
“There is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have opened,” he said a recent address at the National Defense University.
One of Obama’s stated motivations for closing the facility is that Guantanamo Bay is serving as a catalyst for radicalization abroad.
“Instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause,” he said. “Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.”
But Pompeo scoffed at this notion, calling it “ridiculous, silly and dangerous.”
“Those who want to kill us do not need Guantanamo Bay as rationale for their behavior,” he said.
Pompeo also noted that despite reports to the contrary, officials at Guantanamo Bay “run the camp in an incredibly professional way,” and the facility is “consistent with international law and consistent with the American value of fairness.”