The Obama administration is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists, combining military and civilian detention facilities at a single maximum-security prison.
Several senior U.S. officials said the administration is eyeing a soon-to-be-shuttered state maximum security prison in Michigan and the 134-year-old military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., as possible locations for a heavily guarded site to hold the 229 suspected al-Qaida, Taliban and foreign fighters now jailed at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.
The officials outlined the plans — the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camp by Jan. 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil — on condition of anonymity because the options are under review.More here.
Other than for the sake of empty political rhetoric, remind us again why we are closing Gitmo?
While we're on the subject of the press, The Daily News, usually part and parcel of Obama-complaint media and the "civil liberties" chorus, did show some unusual editorial independence in assailing the legal advocacy in support of incarcerated terrorists at Gitmo and elsewhere:
Regular old U.S. criminals should be so lucky as to enjoy the devoted legal representation that has rallied to the sides of Islamist terrorists convicted of plotting the mass murder of Americans.
Self-styled human rights champions who made the Guantanamo Bay detention center a false symbol of barbarism have turned to easing the ultra-secure domestic imprisonments of fanatic jihadists.
They say that the likes of shoe-bomber Richard Reid, serving life in the Super Max prison in Florence, Colo., and American Taliban John Walker Lindh, held in tough confinement in Indiana, have a constitutional right to pray with fellow Muslim inmates.
Those include Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and Wadih el-Hage, one-time aide to Osama Bin Laden, who was convicted of an embassy bombing that killed 247 people in 1998. You can imagine the kinds of things that might come up in such an Arabic-speaking prayer group.
Absolute isolation is necessary and neither cruel nor unusual for a class of inmates who will wreak mayhem wherever then can, inside prison or out. Lest you doubt, recall what happened in 2006 when three of the Trade Center bombers had mail privileges: They sent 90 cheerleading letters to terror networks that were printed in Arabic newspapers and used as recruiting flyers.
The perversity of wielding the First Amendment to claim that radical crazies have a constitutional right to exercise their religion together, not separately, is beyond breathtaking. And yet, in this day and age, it is not simply being laughed right out of court.
