Obama's Gitmo screw up having political costs

NY Times:

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Republican lawmakers, who oppose Mr. Obama’s plan, found a talking point with political appeal. They said closing Guantánamo could allow dangerous terrorists to get off on legal technicalities and be released into quiet neighborhoods across the United States. If the detainees were convicted, the Republicans continued, American prisons housing terrorism suspects could become magnets for attacks.

Meanwhile, none of the Democrats who on Thursday hailed the closing of the detention camp were stepping forward to offer prisons in their districts or states to receive the prisoners.

Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, taunted the chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, by suggesting that the authorities reopen Alcatraz Prison in the San Francisco Bay.

On Friday, a spokesman for Mrs. Feinstein countered that Alcatraz now was a “national park and tourist attraction, not a functioning prison,” and that the senator “does not consider it a suitable place to house detainees.”

But Mrs. Feinstein does believe that some Guantánamo prisoners could be moved to maximum-security civilian or military prisons in the United States, the spokesman said, not naming any specific ones.

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in response to a question on Friday that Guantánamo detainees who were moved to the United States “should be held at maximum-security federal facilities wherever they are available.” Like other Democrats queried Friday, Mr. Levin did not specifically address the question of prisoners moving to his state.

One of the first Democrats in Congress to address the not-in-my-backyard issue directly was Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, who told reporters this week that terrorism suspects would be no more dangerous in a secure Pennsylvania prison than they were in Cuba.

“There are thousands of dangerous prisoners being held securely behind bars in supermax prisons across the United States,” Mr. Murtha said Friday. He noted, however, that there was no supermax facility in his district.

The number of detainees who may face federal trials — by various estimates, 50 to 100 of the remaining Guantánamo inmates — is tiny by the standards of the federal prison system, which currently holds 201,375 people in 114 facilities, according to Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Those include 9 detention centers that hold defendants awaiting trial, 21 high-security penitentiaries and a supersecure prison in Florence, Colo., where several convicted terrorists are already locked up.

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If these detainees were thrown into the general prison population they would very likely be killed by the other inmates. The other concerns expressed are equally valid.

Closing Gitmo is a really boneheaded move based on a false narrative about the facility that has been embraced by the left in this country and elsewhere. It has been accompanied with moral preening and self righteousness that I find offensive. Levin and Feinstein know it is a false narrative but they have had so much success beating up on the Bush administration it is hard for them to back off. This is a building screw up that will be hard to ignore.

One of the interesting aspects of it is that the NY Times is leading the discussion of the problems. It will be interesting to see if the papers editorial board is as enlightened. I would not bet on it.