Marine Sergeant Xavier Reyes patrols a then-new housing unit inside the Naval Consolidated Brig Charleston at Joint Base Charleston-Weapons Station, S.C., Sept. 20, 2011. (Nicole Mickle/U.S. Air Force)
The Pentagon has sent a team to assess a second site as a possible U.S. replacement for the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as it tries to make good on President Barack Obama’s commitment to close the facility in Cuba before he leaves office.
The team is at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C., to see what enhancements would be necessary for the facility to serve as a permanent detention site and a location for future military commissions, Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said Wednesday. They will look at construction, force protection, troop housing and other areas that would have to be addressed, and include that information in a plan the administration will submit to Congress.
A plan to close Guantanamo Bay “was close to completion even before [congressional] recess,” Davis said, noting that in the back-and-forth between congressional offices and the Pentagon, “it was determined they wanted to have some specific cost information included in that.”
Last month the assessment team evaluated the Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and will be looking at some non-Department of Defense sites as well, Davis said.
Congress has resisted bringing detainees to the states; in recent weeks the representatives for Kansas and South Carolina, which house the two federal facilities, have said they would oppose transfer. South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, told reporters last month that she opposed moving Guantanamo prisoners to Charleston, saying “we are not going to allow South Carolina to become a magnet for terrorists to come here.”
Davis said Wednesday that the Pentagon had no response to the congressional criticism, but said the team would continue to do the site assessments.
Obama has vowed to close Guantanamo since 2008. There are 116 detainees remaining in the facility; of those, 64 have been determined to be too dangerous to transfer to a third-party country and will require long-term incarceration. The administration is working through the remaining 52 cases to verify that they will not be a security risk and to determine where they can be transferred.
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