John Yoo: Obama’s Gitmo Plan Is ‘Dead on Arrival’ in Congress

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
HARLOW: “Republicans in the campaign trail immediately chiming in. you’ll hear from them in a moment. Also Kansas Republican Senator Pat Roberts reacted this way.”
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ROBERTS: “This is what I think of the president’s plan to send terrorists to the United States.”
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HARLOW: “Joining me to talk more about this, a former DoD official John Yoo who wrote the memos authorizing enhanced interrogation under the bush administration. He also helped establish those who were labeled quote/unquote enemy combatants. He is now a law professor at Berkeley. He’s the editor of the in a newly released book, “Liberty’s Nemesis.” Also with us, Karen Greenberg, the director of the center on national security at university law school, also author of “The Least Worst Place,” con tawn Guantanamo’s first 100 days. Karen, how likely is it that the president will be able to successfully push this through?”
GREENBERG: “It’s hard to make a prediction –“
HARLOW: “It’s been seven years.” 
GREENBERG: “I think he’s going to be able to do it. i think the timing is right. i think he can get certain people like John McCain on board who had asked for this plan to be submitted. i think he may be able to pull some kind of bipartisan coalition together. I do thing the declining numbers of detainees, which are now below 100 and could go below 50, and make a big difference in terms of bringing the detainees to the United States. So I think there’s a possibility this could happen. i also think as he said today in his speech and repeated several times, he really wants this to happen. and whereas he might have put it aside for other reasons earliness presidency, he seems to really –“ 
HARLOW: “Bush before him wanted it closed.”
GREENBERG: “But he did not put the process in motion. Bush did well, if you think about it. Returned over 500 detainees to places around the globe. So he knew from the beginning that this was going to have to be withered down to a smaller number.”
HARLOW: “All right, so John, to you, when you look at this plan being sort of one of the architects of, you know, what would enable people to be held there after 9/11, what do you see as the single biggest problem with the plan?”
YOO: “I think it’s dead on arrival in congress. You played the clip of Senator Roberts refusing to go along. I think the majority of the republicans and senate are not going to go along with it, not to mention in the house. And they’ve, as you know, have already passed a funding ban prohibiting any of the detainees from being brought into the United States. So President Obama I think is a constitutional matter is free to send any of the detainees abroad to other countries, even though the Defense Department and the intelligence agencies feel about a third of them somehow go back into the fight in one way or the other. But I don’t think he’s going to be able to shut the prison down if he’s got to bring those remaining 90 or 50 or whatever the last number is back into the United States where congress has prohibited all funds being used to support that process.”
HARLOW: “What we do know is that three previously released Gitmo detainees have gone on to join QAP. That’s why they can’t return those from Yemen to Yemen. That’s the big concern right now. For Americans sitting at home perhaps in one of the states where these detainees will be transferred, how concerned do you think they should be about radicalizing others, about rejoining the fight?”
YOO: “We don’t have any data on that of course because none of them have been brought back to the united states already but I’ll remind you, one of the reasons this became such a big deal was because the administration wanted to bring the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to New York City for a trial and detain him in downtown New York City. and even if they were secured in the facility, you have to be worried terrorist groups are going to try to break them out, launch attacks around the facility. What community would want that in their neighborhood? whether there’s a military base or secure prison or not.”