Reps. Hudson, Pittenger slam Obama plan to close Guantanamo Bay

ROCKINGHAM — Richmond County’s current congressman and its prospective future voice in Washington have sharply criticized President Barack Obama’s push to close the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison for enemy combatants and terrorism suspects.

Reps. Richard Hudson, R-Concord, and Robert Pittenger, R-Charlotte, both panned the plan to close Gitmo and move many detainees to the United States, including prisons in South Carolina, Kansas and Colorado along with a proposed $475 million secure facility for dangerous detainees.

“At a time when the American people’s No. 1 concern is national security, the president is doubling down on his dangerous campaign promise to shutter Guantanamo Bay,” Hudson said in a Tuesday statement. “Despite the president’s attempts, folks continue to agree that we don’t want these war criminals and hardened terrorists transferred to American soil — which current law prohibits — or transferred to other countries to return to the battlefield against us.”

Hudson noted that the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law last November prohibits the transfer of Gitmo detainees to the United States.

Hudson represents North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District. If federal judges approve revised maps drawn to correct racial gerrymanders in the 1st and 12th districts, Richmond, Scotland and Anson counties would be shifted to the 9th District, which Pittenger has represented since 2013.

A strident critic of the president, Pittenger pulled no punches in his statement on the Guantanamo closure.

“Moving these terrorists to South Carolina or elsewhere in the United States further demonstrates President Obama’s soft, apologetic approach to these extremists, seeming to believe America is at fault for their acts of evil,” he said.

Obama has long called for the prison’s closure, citing allegations of human rights abuses, torture of detainees, a lack of due process and that the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been used as a recruitment tool for terrorists.

“I don’t want to pass this problem onto the next president, whoever it is,” Obama said in an appearance at the White House. “If we don’t do what’s required now, I think future generations are going to look back and ask why we failed to act when the right course, the right side of history and justice and our best American traditions was clear.”

Watchdog groups say transferring Gitmo detainees to the U.S. wouldn’t solve the problem as long as individuals are held indefinitely without being charged. However, many foreign governments view Guantanamo Bay as a symbol for American excesses in the post-9/11 war on terror.

Obama’s proposal faces an uphill climb in the Republican-controlled Congress, with House Speaker Paul Ryan pledging that the transfer of Gitmo detainees to U.S. soil “will stay against the law” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressing deep skepticism.

“President Obama has never acknowledged the threat of radical Islamist terrorists,” Pittenger said. “His policies regarding Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Syria illustrate either inept understanding of the intentions of America’s adversaries, or worse, a very misguided view of evil and how it should be addressed.”

North Carolina’s junior senator, Thom Tillis, expressed outrage at the plan and pledged he would do everything he could to defeat it.

“So many brave men and women from North Carolina have risked their lives to capture Islamic terrorists and send them to Guantanamo Bay, where they no longer pose a threat to the world,” Tillis said in a statement. “It’s unbelievable that President Obama is now calling for transferring these dangerous terrorists to American soil.”