Democrats Wrongly Play to NIMBYS on Guantanamo

On the matter of closing the controversial Guantanamo military prison and, more important, deciding what to do with the 240 detainees still held there, our elected officials have made a mess of things and there is blame to go around at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

First, President Obama made a colossal blunder when he signed an executive order to shutter the prison in one year, setting a deadline of Jan. 22, 2010, without first drafting a plan for what to do with the detainees. Perhaps Obama assumed that most of the inmates could be transferred to foreign countries but that was never likely, given that so few countries were interested in taking them in. Or maybe the thinking was that many of the inmates could be tried in U.S. federal courts, but that was not a perfect solution either, because the administration has acknowledged that more than 100 prisoners would need to be moved to the United States, including many who are described as too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted for one reason or another.

Today, President Obama is expected to lay out what his spokesman described as a "hefty part" of the administration's plan to deal with detainees. We're eager to hear it.

Up until now, members of Congress have been right to raise concerns about how half-baked the president's closure order was, and to demand more specifics. But this week Senate Democratic leaders said they would not provide the $80 million that Obama requested to close the detention center at Guantanamo.

Senate Democratic leaders were wrong to base much of their opposition to Obama's order on something as provincial as NIMBY concerns that some of these terror suspects might be incarcerated in the home districts of lawmakers.

Of course, that was always going to happen. No matter where these bad actors wind up on U.S. soil, they'll be in someone's district; the only question is whose. That battle still has to be fought. Democrats, in particular, want to have it both ways by vowing to help Obama close Guantanamo and yet also condemning the idea that terror suspects could be transferred to the United States. One minute, Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev., is saying that "Guantanamo makes us less safe." The next, Reid is vowing that "we will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States."

Come again? If we close Guantanamo, the inmates obviously have to go somewhere. And there is nothing wrong with some of them being tried, convicted and incarcerated in the same country that they allegedly conspired against: the United States. We have plenty of dangerous criminals inhabiting state and federal prisons right now, many of them just a short drive from where our kids gather for soccer practice.

Chances are, lawmakers in Washington understand this, even if they don't have the courage to say it out loud because they're too busy pandering to NIMBYs. And these are the people who are supposed to keep us safe? Now, that's a scary thought.

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