stein@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting
This is another stupid Republican Pet Trick that should not even be debated. No criminal has ever escaped from a maximum security prison in the US. If you are going to start a war and attack terrorists, be prepared to bring them to the US so they can be prosecuted and imprisoned.
The Republican diaper baby approach is to put the detainees in secret prisons in Eastern Europe and Egypt. Rightardia applauds President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder for showing some intestinal fortitude on this issue.
A Republican lawmaker in Illinois said his GOP colleagues would be 'idiots' to kill a proposal to transfer terrorist suspects from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the maximum-security prison in Thomson, Illinois.
Representative Jim Sacia of the state's 89th District accused Republicans in Washington -- including Senate candidate, Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill) -- of risking thousands of local jobs in their demagoguery of the detainee issue.
"My thinking on this is extremely positive," Sacia told the Huffington Post. "If we lose this opportunity. All I can think of is we literally are idiots. I mean that sincerely."
"I understand I'm on different pages of music with others in my party. First of all this should not be a partisan issue in anyway. If President Obama brings the detainees on U.S. soil and we sit here with a brand new state-of-the-art, max security prison, sitting vacant for the last eight years, and pass on an opportunity to sell it to the federal government, which we would fill it with 1,500 regular prisoners and 800 detainees, what is the problem? The building was designed to do that.
"The only reason we have rhetoric now is because of the closing of Gitmo," Sacia concluded. "It makes no sense at all. This is a tremendous opportunity and we would be idiots to waste it."
A town of 450, Thomson found itself thrust into the national political spotlight after Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and others pushed it as a potential home for Guantanamo Bay detainees. Defenders of the proposal say it could create as many as 3,000 jobs.
Sacia, whose district is in the neighboring area, notes that when the facility was built in 2001, businesses popped up all around it anticipating that it would be fully operational. Today, only 200 minimum-security inmates are housed in the 1,600-cell prison, requiring the attendance of only 82 staff members.
"We have so many citizens in my district and bordering my district who have suffered unbelievable economic hardship because they planned for and built businesses all for a prison they believed would be open," Sacia said.
A former law enforcement official, Sacia saved one of his main complaints for those who warn that transferring detainees to Thomson would make the site a target for terrorists -- a concern aired by his home-state Senate candidate and fellow Republican, Mark Kirk.
source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/17/illinois-republican-we-wo_n_361114.html
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