PrintAugust 3, 2009
Welcome Gitmo Prisoners to the US!
A promise is a promise - even if fulfilling that promise becomes a duplication of facilities we already have, a nightmare of bureaucratic tangles, and to top it off, dangerous people who want to kill you coming to American soil.
But that's just what Obama has in mind for a kind of "Super-Gitmo" that will be built on American soil according to Peter Finn and Scott Wilson of the Washington Post:
The administration is considering whether to transfer some detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a facility in the United States that would contain courtrooms to hold federal criminal trials and military commissions to prosecute terrorism suspects, administration officials said Sunday.
The maximum-security facility would be jointly run by the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, with each assuming responsibility for different sets of inmates. Officials said such a facility could also house prisoners held in indefinite detention and those cleared for release but who have no country willing to accept them. Those convicted in federal court or military commissions could serve their terms there.
Officials said administration planners looking for one site for the facility have focused on the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a state maximum-security prison in Standish, Mich., that is scheduled to be closed.
The only thing Gitmo doesn't have that the Obama administration wants in any new detention facility are courtrooms to hold trials. All the rest is already up and running at Guantanamo which raises the logical question of why move the prisoners at all? Wouldn't it be simpler, and cheaper, to build a courtroom within the detention center?
Of course it would be - which is why it is not being done. There is no logic or reason to Obama's insistence on closing Gitmo - only politics. And for this crew in the White House, politics trumps national security every time.
