(CNN) - Congressman Duncan Hunter said during Wednesday night's GOP debate that, if elected president, he would hold terror suspects indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay if he felt they were too dangerous to be set free and the U.S. could not convict them.
"And let me tell you," said the California Republican, that "the proof of that is the fact that we have conducted these combatant review tribunals. And we've actually sent back to the battlefield or sent back to Afghanistan some of the people that we thought were no longer a threat."
"Some of those people have shown up on the battlefield bearing arms against our soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines, back on the battlefield after we sent them back," declared Hunter. "If anything, we've been too liberal with the release of terrorists."
Hunter went on to say that the conditions at Guantanamo Bay were, in his view, anything but substandard. "The last time I looked at the menu, they had honey-glazed chicken and rice pilaf on Friday. That's how we treat the terrorists," he said.
"They've got health care that's better than most HMOs. And they got something else that no Democrat politician in America has. They live in a place called Guantanamo, where not one person has ever been murdered," proclaimed the presidential hopeful. "And there's not one politician, one Democrat politician in America, that can say that about one of the prisons in his home district. We've got to keep Guantanamo open."
–CNN Political Desk Editor Jamie Crawford