Moving to Illinois

The detention camp at Guantanamo will be closed; a new prison, actually located on sacred American soil, will replace it.

Now Illinois, Barack Obama’s home state, will be made a martyr. A “few dozen” inmates, perhaps 30 but perhaps as many as 70, will be transferred from Guantanamo to the new super-maximum security prison for currently undetermined period of time. On Tuesday, Obama ordered the federal government to purchase the practically empty Thomson Correctional Center and convert it into a fortress bristling with weapons.

Obama’s goal of closing the Guantanamo facility is thus one small step closer to realization. According to one of Obama’s first orders, Guantanamo was to be closed by the end of January 2010. That this will not occur is one of Obama’s bitter realities as this internationally very popular decision ran up against stubborn and totally irrational opposition in his own country. Besides, the measure resulted in many inevitable court rulings that were seen as advantageous to the inmates.

Nevertheless, the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate rebelled and in May voted 90 to six not to fund the transfer of prisoners from Guantanamo. They later relented a bit and voted to at least permit the prisoners to tread on America’s sacred soil in order to stand trial. In response to that decision, governors and local politicians in states such as Kansas, Michigan and South Carolina all said they wanted nothing to do with it; they couldn’t, in all good conscience, expect the citizens of their states to expose themselves to such dangerous people!

That reaction puzzled observers overseas who thought American citizens and politicians had an intimate relationship with their criminal justice system, which acts as an outlet for the tensions that inevitably arise in a society which places such emphasis on rugged individualism.

More than two million people are behind bars in the United States. American society cares about the fate of these social losers to the extent that they are locked away. The criminal justice system in the United States also creates jobs in many areas; where factories closed down, prisons were built so the unemployed at least had a chance to work as guards, or in institutional laundries and bakeries. Thomson was one of those lockups, but its prisoner population today is a mere 200 inmates. Private companies were sure they would profit by building prisons and offering their services to the state.

A regular competition for prisoners evolved between states. In addition, inmates are an extremely cheap source of labor. A large proportion of the helmets, flak jackets and canteens used by soldiers in Afghanistan were made in U.S. prisons under conditions critics describe as modern-day slavery.

This all worked without any great difficulty, as long as the inmates consisted only of spree killers, murderers, rapists and narcotics kingpins. But those coming from Guantanamo apparently belong to an entirely different category, presumably some kind of monsters with supernatural powers. Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas was “deeply disturbed” by Obama’s plan and remarked, “This action will expose our citizens to unnecessary danger; that’s unjustifiable and unacceptable.”

And just who are these “few dozen” prisoners, anyway? Certainly not the prominent al-Qaeda terrorist masterminds like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who will stand trial in a New York civilian court along with four other individuals. Forty more of the remaining 210 Guantanamo inmates are also scheduled to stand trial as well.

Up to a hundred inmates, many of whom have been officially cleared of any terrorist activities, could be handed over to other countries – even if Wolfgang Schäuble still has his doubts about the handful of Uighurs who would like to be resettled in Munich. That leaves around 70 prisoners who can’t be tried due to the fact that their testimonies were coerced by torture or other methods the CIA doesn’t care to make public in court. Or they fall into the nebulous category of being too dangerous to ever be let free, whatever that means.

“The only thing that President Obama is doing with this announcement is changing the ZIP code of Guantanamo,” said Tom Parker, Amnesty International USA policy director. “The detainees who are currently scheduled to be relocated to Thomson have not been charged with any crime,” Parker said. “In seven years, the U.S. government, including the CIA and FBI, has not produced any evidence against these individuals that can be taken into a court of law.”