In Wartime, Focus on Detainment of Terrorists, Not Rehabilitation

The following is a partial transcript of an interview with Congressman Jim Bridenstine (OK-1) that featured in the Monday, June 9th edition of Secure Freedom Radio. The entire interview may be listened to here. Congressman Bridenstine serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Frank Gaffney: There’s a report–I don’t think you’ve seen it, Congressman Jim Bridenstine–our friend and colleague Paul Sperry had in the New York Post over the weekend indicating that the President is aggressively moving forward on other efforts to remove these guys, including perhaps releasing as many as half of the detainees that remain in Guantanamo Bay this summer. If you could, just give us a sense of the character of the folks who are left [in Guantanamo Bay] and what the implications might be if we find this kind of wholesale dismantling of this detention facility.

Rep. Jim Bridenstine: Well, we have seen a commitment from this administration to close Guantanamo Bay going back to his first election and then his second election. There was a time when he was trying to bring a number of the most hardened terrorists to the United States to have them tried in Article III courts. Here’s the situation–I’m going to speak as a warfighter for a second. There are two types of law. There is the law of war and there is the law of peace. When you’re at war, you detain people not for rehabilitation, not for punishment; you detain them to get them off the battlefield until the end of hostilities. That is under the law of war, and this is an important piece of what Guantanamo Bay is for the American military. It is a way to detain people until the end of conflict. Unfortunately there is confusion, even among my colleagues on the Republican side, about the difference between why you detain people in wartime and why you detain people in peacetime. That confusion is creating this environment where people, even on my side of the aisle, some of them are saying we need to close Guantanamo Bay. Now, if there’s a strategic reason to close it, then that’s an argument that needs to be had. But if people are arguing that they need their Article III protections per the Constitution, under the laws of war we have every authority to detain them until the end of armed conflict and the last I checked, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have not decided to end the war or sign a peace treaty.

FG: To the contrary, there’s every evidence that they’re redoubling their efforts as we saw the Pakistani branch doing in Karachi yesterday. Just to drill down on this…the President says: we are winding down the war. So, we have to wind down both the authority that we have given the President–his predecessor initially–to conduct that war and we need to wind down facilities like Gitmo as well. I take it you don’t think we’re actually winding down the war, at least in terms of the enemy’s determination to continue to prosecute it.

JB: No, not at all. What we’re seeing now is we’re seeing the Taliban and Al Qaeda more emboldened than we’ve seen them in years. And of course this is a direct result of the policy that this President is putting forward. You know, this isn’t fun and games. This isn’t about political philosophy. These are real world issues where Americans are put at risk and the world is becoming more dangerous–not less dangerous. And when America projects weakness, this is what we get. We get emboldened enemies and we get friends and allies around the world that don’t trust us. This is terrible policy and this is not one of those things where if you’re nice to them, they’ll be nice to us back. That’s not how this works.