The Senate’s version of the fiscal 2017 defense policy bill keeps tight restrictions in place to prevent the president from closing Gitmo, but makes some small changes that critics of the detention center say are a step in the right direction. Allowing detainees to come to the U.S. temporarily for medical care is among the changes.
The Senate Armed Services Committee voted on Thursday to advance a bill to the full Senate that would allow detainees to plead guilty to criminal charges in federal courts via videoteleconference and allow the detainees to serve their sentences in other countries.
Scott Roehm, vice president of programs and policy at the Constitution Project, said that this will be helpful for those detainees who can’t be charged at the military commissions, since they haven’t committed war crimes, but could be in federal court if they were allowed to be transferred to the U.S. Allowing them to enter their plea via video gets around this issue.
“If those and other detainees are willing to plead guilty, and would consent to doing so via videoconference, of course Congress should allow it,” Roehm said. “The details of a provision like this matter, but it sounds like a step forward.”
Roehm also applauded the provision allowing detainees to get medical care in the U.S.
“Guantanamo doesn’t have the capacity for sophisticated medical care necessary to treat an aging population, including torture survivors, that will continue to develop chronic health conditions,” Roehm said. “Failing to allow U.S. transfers even for medical emergencies that Guantanamo can’t handle is legally and ethically indefensible.”
Especially as the prisoner population gets older, critics have argued that flying medical equipment and personnel to Cuba is too expensive.
Democrats have tried to include this provision in previous defense authorization bills, but it has always been stripped out of the final compromise between the Senate and House, which does not ease Gitmo transfer restrictions at all in its version of the bill.
President Obama has been working to empty the prison of as many prisoners as possible to follow through on a promise made during his campaign to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. The administration presented Congress a plan to close the facility this year, but it was largely criticized as lacking specifics, especially because it did not name a U.S. location to which prisoners could be moved.
Eighty detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay today.
This year’s Senate bill, however, keeps many prohibitions in place, including extending bans on permanent transfers to the U.S., using federal money to construct or modify facilities in the U.S. to house detainees, transferring detainees to Libya, Somalia, Syria or Yemen, and closing the naval station in Cuba.
“The bill does not make it meaningfully easier to close Guantanamo,” Roehm said. “Continuing the blanket prohibition on U.S. transfers, which to date has effectively barred the use of federal courts, is particularly irrational.”
The bill also includes a change that would allow women to serve as guards at Gitmo regardless of detainee complaints. Detainees who had an issue with a female guard could previously request that they be guarded only by men and prevent these women from doing their jobs, which Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., said discriminated against female troops.
“These women serving in the military are being prevented from fully doing the jobs they are trained to do because those who planned and facilitated the 9/11 attacks have a problem with women,” Ayotte said in a statement. “We should not let those who supported terrorist attacks that murdered almost 3,000 people on U.S. soil dictate how women in the military do their jobs — simply because they are women.”
