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The following are Sen. McConnell's floor remarks a few minutes ago on the Inouye/Inhofe amendment to the supplemental funding bill (that would prevent the transfer of Gitmo detainees to the United States) .
"I'd say to my good friend, the Majority Leader, I understand he has laid down an amendment to be offered by the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, our good friend from Hawaii, and Senator Inhofe related to Guantanamo, and I'm pleased that the majority has recognized that the President's policy of putting an arbitrary deadline on the closing of Guantanamo is a mistake.
"And I think a first step toward moving us in the direction of getting a new policy is to prevent funding in this bill or any other bill from being used for the purpose of closing Guantanamo down.
"What we need to remember is that Guantanamo is a $200 million state-of-the-art facility, it has appropriate courtrooms for the military commissions that we established a couple of years ago at the direction of the Supreme Court, no one has ever escaped Guantanamo.
"I think we need to think once again about the rightness of the policy of closing this facility. It presents an immediate dilemma among the 250 or so people who are left there now. They're among the most hardened terrorists in the world, including people who planned the 9/11 attacks on this country.
"We know how the Senate feels about bringing them to the U.S. We had that vote two years ago. It was 94-3 against bringing these terrorists to the United States. What we really need here is to rethink the policy of closing this facility.
"If our rationale for closing it is to be more popular with the Europeans, I must say, we don't -- we don't represent the Europeans. We represent the people of the United States. I think we have a pretty clear sense of how the people in this country feel about bringing these terrorists to the United States.
"So, Mr. President, I congratulate our good friends on the majority. I think they're heading in the right direction. We know the President on national security issues has shown some flexibility in the past. For example, he changed his position on releasing photographs of things that occurred at Abu Ghraib.
"He changed his position on the using of military commissions. He has now rethought that and opened up the possibility that maybe military commissions established by the previous administration and this congress are a good way to try these terrorists. He rethought his position on Iraq and moved away from an arbitrary time line for withdrawal. And we know he has now ordered a surge in Afghanistan, led by the same people who orchestrated and led the surge in Iraq, which was so successful.
"So the President has demonstrated his ability to rethink these national security issues. I'm confident and hopeful that he will now, getting this clear message from both the house and the senate on the appropriations bill, begin to rethink the appropriateness of an arbitrary time line for the closing of Guantanamo.
"So, Mr. President, I fully intend to support this amendment. I hope all members of the Senate will. I thank Senator Inouye and Senator Cochran, who is here, for their leadership on this bill, and I particularly want to thank Senator Inhofe who's been one of our leaders on this subject for a long time and reminded everyone today that he was down at Guantanamo not too long after 9/11, has been there a number of times. I have been there myself. We all know it is a state-of-the-art facility in which the detainees are appropriately and humanely treated. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor."