The Gitmo NIMBYs

Over the weekend, the White House floated the idea of constructing (or renovating) a vast court-and-prison complex in either Kansas or Michigan. The facility would be used to detain and prosecute terrorism suspects now being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The leak followed published reports last week that the Justice Department is evaluating anew dozens of cases of Gitmo detainees to see if any more of the men should be prosecuted in American courtrooms under federal criminal law.

Both of these developments are perfectly logical, refreshingly practical and entirely consistent with the Obama administration's promise to close Gitmo by the end of the year. For years, remember, the closure of the base has been a bipartisan goal, opposed only by the worst ideologues in both parties.

But now that we're actually facing the tough moral and political choices necessary to closing Guantanamo, politicians are running for cover. Take Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.). The senior senator from the Sunflower State was cheering along with all the rest of us when President George W. Bush told us in late 2001 that we'd need to sacrifice in the name of winning the war on terror. Now, however, Brownback has gone into full Chicken Little mode, warning anyone who will listen that Gitmo should not be emptied and closed after all because it's too dangerous to have prisoners at Ft. Leavenworth. "We don't want them here," he said on Monday. "They should be treated with dignity and humanely, but it shouldn't it be here."

This is the terror-law equivalent of a "not in my backyard" mentality that has thwarted the resolution of thorny issues in America for centuries. Except that the problem of what to do with the detainees is not like the problem of what to do with the nuclear waste bound for Yucca Mountain. The prisoners are men, mortals, and they won't be around for a half-life. They aren't even the "worst of the worst," a grossly unfair label that men such as former Attys. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales and John Ashcroft placed on them despite strong evidence to the contrary.

A great many terrorists have been successfully prosecuted and sentenced under federal criminal law -- both before and after Sept. 11, 2001. The roster of current maximum-security federal inmates reads like a Who's Who of Terrorism: Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Reid, Jose Padilla, Ramzi Yousef, Ahmed Ressam (not to mention home-grown lovelies such as Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber).