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As President Barack Obama tries to empty Guantanamo Bay of detainees, Americans and their politicians made it clear they don’t want terrorists in their backyards.
“We don’t want them around,” Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said as most Democrats joined Republicans in denying Obama funding that would bring them here.
It’s a little late to be worrying about that now.
Men who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 already live in Colorado. John Walker Lindh, the erstwhile American Taliban, makes his home in Indiana. The blind Egyptian cleric who plotted to blow up New York City landmarks resides in North Carolina.
In all, 355 inmates convicted of terrorist-related crimes, international or domestic, reside in U.S. prisons, by the Department of Justice’s count. Some live in maximum security penitentiaries, their movements and contacts severely restricted.
The most dangerous among them are sent to a “Supermax” facility outside Florence, Colo., specifically designed for the job.
Not only does that prison hold men bent on destroying America, it also houses home-grown, lesser-known murderers too violent and uncontrollable to be handled in mere maximum security prisons.
With the country’s most dangerous criminals living nearby, surely the citizens of Florence shake in fear each day they send their children out to play.
No doubt they’re begging Washington to shut down the Supermax and fretting that their town, nestled in the Rocky Mountain foothills, will become the next Guantanamo Bay.
Actually, they asked for it. Folks in and near Florence took up a collection in the 1980s so they could buy the land to give the government to locate the prison there.
Please, they said, put it in our backyard.
They wanted the jobs, almost 1,000 positions to staff the four prisons within the federal complex.
“We were under no misconception they were going to fill it with kindergarteners,” says Florence Mayor Bart Hall.
The county already had eight state prisons, making corrections a recession-proof, economic mainstay of the area. And while it isn’t the sort of thing the town advertises in “Welcome to Florence” newcomer baskets, the prisons are something that long-time residents take for granted.
Isn’t it scary having all those America-hating, bomb-building convicts out there? We are talking about a quiet, politically conservative, three-stop-light bedroom community with 3,600 residents and a single main street.
“Most of us don’t lock our doors, either to our cars or our house,” Mayor Hall said over the phone.
True, they have no Guantanamo graduates there. What they do have are men found guilty of crimes far more serious than the unproven allegations that put many of the men in the U.S. prison camp in Cuba.
Consider Ramzi Yousef. Born in Kuwait, he came to the U.S. in 1992 and began hatching a scheme with other militants to plant bombs in Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Killing a few Jews proved too modest a goal for Yousef, who then embarked on a plot to take down the World Trade Center twin towers. But the bomb he set in the garage underneath the complex didn’t do the job. Six people died, 1,000 were injured, and the towers remained standing until Sept. 11, 2001.
Yousef eluded authorities for two years. By the time he was caught in Pakistan, he had been linked to a plan to blow up 11 long-distance U.S. flights. During a test run, one passenger was killed when a device exploded beneath his seat.
While on the lam, Yousef helped build another device in an apartment in Manila that caught fire, allegedly as he and others were preparing to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a visit to the Philippines.
“I am a terrorist, and I am proud of it,” Yousef declared at his sentencing in 1998.
He got life in prison plus 240 years, which he is now spending in Florence.
Now ask your average American whether he would rather have an inmate from Florence locked up nearby or a Guantanamo Bay detainee. You know the answer.
It doesn’t matter that the Defense Department itself, federal judges and Guantanamo prosecutors have all publicly declared that scores of detainees don’t deserve to be kept behind bars. There is no credible evidence against many of them, according to court orders.
(Those detainees are unlikely to be charged with crimes, anyway, and will be released when the U.S. can find suitable countries to have them.)
The point is that when it comes to Guantanamo, few talk rationally of the options.
In Florence, at least, they know better. Those who do worry about it told reporters they fear lower property values or the prison being targeted by terrorists. No one seems concerned about the possible arrival of more dangerous inmates.
“I can’t imagine they could be much worse than those already there,” Hall says.
Whenever the government is ready to start prosecuting detainees in U.S. courts, it won’t be easy to move them securely to holding facilities for trial and then to a secure prison.
Hall, at least, says he is very confident officials are up to the job.
What he knows – and most of us forget – is that the government has had plenty of practice with the worst of the worst. And for those living nearby, it isn’t so bad.
Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News.
