US Senate Sends Defense Policy Bill Against Closing Guantanomo

 The U.S. senate on Thursday passed an annual defense policy bill which restricts on transferring detainees out of the Guantanomo Bay facility and sends it to the lame-duck President Barack Obama who has been trying to close it for years.

The wide-ranging National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was passed by senators in a 92-7 vote on Thursday, one week after the House of Representatives approved it in a 375-34 vote.

However, it remains unclear if Obama will sign it. The outgoing president has been often criticized by some defense hawks for his efforts to downsize the Pentagon. The White House has frequently threatened to veto previous version of the bill, but only followed through in 2015, according to local media reports. .

The bill for the fiscal year of 2017 would authorize a total of 618.7 billion dollars in spending, including more than 67 billion dollars for a war fund known as the overseas contingency operations (OCO) account, said a Politico news report.

The bill includes a troop pay raise of 2.1 percent, though Obama has only requested for a 1.6 percent pay raise. It also calls for 3.2 billion dollars more in base defense funding than Obama has requested, plus an additional 5.8 billion dollars in White House-requested war dollars.

As for the size of the Army and Marine Corps, the new bill authorizes 476,000 active-duty soldiers (16,000 more than requested) and 185,000 Marines (3,000 more than requested).

"The president-elect has said we're not spending enough and we aren't doing enough," Republican Senator John McCain said on the Senate floor Thursday. "And by the way, we've go to do it right. We need to spend more."

On the campaign trail, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump promised a massive military building-up, including boosting the Army to 540,000 active-duty soldiers, increasing the Navy to 350 warships and adding 1,200 new Air Force fighter jets.

Source: Xinhua