'Gitmo by the lake'

The prison is a $145 million white elephant. When Illinois was comparatively flush with capital, it built the 1,600-bed penitentiary to stimulate the depressed Mississippi Valley town. But the state is now a basket case. Budgetary woes have squeezed law-enforcement funding, and local politicians - including former state senator Barack Obama - have insisted that alternatives to incarceration be found, even for violent offenders; as a consequence less than 10 percent of the TCC's space is currently being used. Naturally, Obama's home-state Democrats are thrilled by the prospect of having Uncle Sam take the TCC off the state's hands. Sen. Dick Durbin and Gov. Pat Quinn issued a statement rapt at the prospect of "generating up to 3,800 jobs" and "injecting more than $1 billion into the regional economy."

This exorbitant "injection" of funds would be necessary because TCC is not ready to accommodate international jihadists, who are prone to riot, savagely attack their custodians, attempt escape, and plot terror attacks while in U.S. prisons. The jail would have to be hardened before it could become the new Gitmo. So even if financial considerations were the first-order priority here - and they should not be - the administration's plan would be inexcusably wasteful. Gitmo has already been hardened, at a cost of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. It is now a state-of-the-art, Geneva Conventions-compliant detention center. It makes no sense to sink those expenditures down a black hole, spending another fortune on a project that won't generate sustainable growth. Illinois found that out when it built TCC in the first place.

As the editorial points out, the money is only half of it. There is also the probability that judges will see fit to release prisoners on to American soil. There are a lot of habeus corpus petitions yet to be heard and once the terrorists are on American soil, a judge can simply order the release of anyone formerly held at Gitmo with no strings attached.

The fact is, this is a tragedy waiting to happen. Even if they harden the facility in Thompson, IL who is going to staff it? Are we to believe that state prison guards are a match for terrorists? And if the military is going to run the prison, why move them from Gitmo in the first place?

As the editorial points out, we have a judicial system that is "fundamentally hostile to the concept of indefinite detention under wartime protocols that do not require proof of a crime." This is especially true since most of the evidence is classified, or based on testimony of other detainees whose lives would be in danger for cooperating with us. Some judges have been hesitant about releasing detainees on US soil but that won't last once the terrorists are physically here:

Once the terrorists are already in the country, though, that hesitancy will vanish. Anyone who doubts that has not been watching the courts' pro-terrorist decisions over the last eight years, to say nothing of such rulings as the 9th Circuit's recent directive that California release over 40,000 convicted inmates in order to relieve the supposed overcrowding in the state's prisons. Indeed, the Obama administration has already floated the idea of releasing Gitmo detainees in the U.S. - and providing public welfare payments to support them - as an example for other countries to follow. And Jennifer Daskal, now advising Holder on detainee issues, spent years as a Human Rights Watch activist campaigning for Gitmo to be shuttered, and detainees released in the United States, if other countries are unwilling to take them. Human Rights Watch also maintains that U.S. "supermax" prisons, where terrorists convicted in civilian courts are incarcerated, are inhumane.

The idea that "human rights" standards can be applied equally to purse snatchers and terrorists may be the biggest self delusion ever held by the left. That thinking is flawed on so many levels that to believe it, one must suspend common sense, tradition, and everything we know about the enemy in order to reach the cockamamie conclusion that the left has in these cases.

Of course, they will be safe and sound in their beds. They can sleep well knowing that a breakout from the prison will not affect them in the slightest.

Meanwhile, I will be less than 150 miles from where these cutthroats will be incarcerated and am thinking of buying a gun for the first time in my life.