According to CNN, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Buck McKeon, suggests not closing Guantanamo but expanding it:
The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said he would like to see more detainees brought to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
Rep. Buck McKeon, R-California, just returned from his first visit to the detention facility.
“I would like to see if we have detainees in other parts of the world that we can’t seem to decide what to do with, that would be a place for them,” McKeon told reporters during a news conference Tuesday.
. . .
“Our nation has invested millions of dollars in building state of the art humane and safe facilities to detain and prosecute the terrorist detainees at Guantanamo. It would be fiscally and morally irresponsible to shutter the facility and invest in new facilities in the United States,” McKeon said.
McKeon said that the facility could handle hundreds more detainees from other facilities around the world.
“We can handle up to 800 there and rather that then spend millions or billions building new facilities and moving elsewhere when we’ve already spent so much and we already have such a great facility there.”
I actually think this is an interesting idea–although, I suspect, for very different reasons than McKeon does.
