FOX "Interview With Senator John Barrasso" - Transcript

Interview

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MR. SMITH: And the prisoners in some cases moved to the United States, according to President Obama, but today, the Democratic-led Senate blocked that move after the FBI director said bringing the 240 prisoners to the United States is too risky and too dangerous.

With us now is Republican Senator John Barrasso. He's the Senator who just returned home from a tour of the Guantanamo Bay facility as I mentioned a moment ago. He was there over the weekend. He's a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and we're happy to have him as our guest today.

Senator, great to see you. Thank you.

SEN. BARRASSO: Great to be with you, Shep. Thank you.

MR. SMITH: All right. We've been told repeatedly. We've spent a lot of money on this facility and it seems to be serving our purposes at the moment, but both the current president and the former president have said they want it closed. Do you see a point in the near future at all where this thing might be able to be closed?

SEN. BARRASSO: No, I don't see that point. This is a facility that is very safe, very secure and all the detainees there are getting remarkably good care, whether it's medical care, whether it's food, whether it's all the things that they would conceivably want. They're getting USA Today. They get al Jazeera Television instead of Fox. They get Sudoku puzzles, 6,000 calories a day. There are 240 of these detainees. There's a medical staff taking care of them of 120 people. They pray five times a day. They interrupt -- they're playing soccer or reading or going to the library and reading their books -- to do the prayers five times a day.

On every floor that I saw there was an arrow pointing to Mecca for prayer times, plus there's a state-of-the-art courtroom and this is where it's really important to not move any of these detainees. It's expensive and it is really state-of-the-art. There's a special place for the families of the 9/11 victims so they can for the trials. There's a whole set up for the translations and places for the press, incredible legal facilities, state-of-the-art like you've not seen anywhere else and to move them from there into the United States is something that I'm going to continue to oppose.

We were able to successfully block what the president wanted to do today in his supplemental budget and I'm so happy to see so many Democrats agree with me in the position to say, until the president has a plan, an absolute plan of what to do with the detainees that there should not be any movement forward in closing Guantanamo Bay. But this isn't over because he has said --

MR. SMITH: Right.

SEN. BARRASSO: That it's going to be closed by the end of this year.

MR. SMITH: And President Bush wanted it closed, too, and the reasons are obvious and I'm not going to go through all of them because we've been through them over the past couple of years ad nauseum and, quite frankly, I'm tired of talking about it.

But could you explain to us what are the deficiencies in the American prison system that would not allow us to adequately house them here?

SEN. BARRASSO: Well, I think our prisons are safe in the United States. I have concerns that if you put a number of these like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 in a given community, that that may then be a focal point for unrest within the community and perhaps terrorists wanting to come onto the grounds of the United States to act in that area.

The other is that I'm concerned that if you take someone from Guantanamo Bay into the United States that then the legal situation changes and I'm not a lawyer; I'm an orthopedic surgeon and I looked at the health care facilities for the detainees there. But from a legal standpoint there are clearly issues that if someone is on the soil of the United States that they may have additional constitutional rights that they don't have when they're in Guantanamo Bay.

So my preference is until I see a well-outlined plan that these detainees should stay exactly where they are in this very safe and very secure location and that's where they need to remain.

MR. SMITH: Senator John Barrasso, Republican. Good to see you, sir. Great of you to be here. Thank you.

SEN. BARRASSO: Thank you, Shep.

MR. SMITH: All right.

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