Pentagon resuming ‘Guantanamo North’ site surveys in Colorado

MIAMI_A Pentagon team tasked with finding potential alternatives inside the United States to imprison and put on trial Guantanamo captives is resuming its site surveys in coming weeks in Colorado, the Defense Department said Friday.tmpplchld The White House quietly notified state and congressional politicians that the teams would inspect a now empty state-run facility, Colorado State Penitentiary II, as well as a federal prison at 10 miles away adjacent to the notorious Florence “supermax” for convicted terrorists.tmpplchld Criticism of the plan soon followed. Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo.,whose district has the two prisons, called it “a dangerous fantasy that will go nowhere” because the law forbids the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States _ as well as an “outrageous and unacceptable” waste of time and taxpayer dollars.tmpplchld Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, was less dismissive.tmpplchld “The governor, like the Pentagon, wants to have a full understanding of the costs, risk and impacts for Colorado,”said Kathy Green, Hickenlooper’s communications director.tmpplchld At the Pentagon, spokesman Navy Cmdr Gary Ross said the surveys would take place “within the next few weeks.”tmpplchld Pentagon staff plan to visit an occupied federal prison, not the ‘supermax,’ and an empty state solitary confinement facilitytmpplchld Ross said the team would visit FCI-Florence, short for the Federal Correction Institute at Florence. It has 1,517 inmates in a medium-security setting, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons online guide, on a site of three prisons collectively housing 2,661 inmates.tmpplchld The site itself is better known for the maximum-security “supermax” penitentiary now holding 405 inmates, many of them convicted terrorists, such as former Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Ghailani, 41, convicted of the East Africa embassies bombings; Ramzi Yousef, 47, the nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, serving life for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; ‘Unibomber’ Ted Kaczynski and FBI agent turned spy Robert Hanssen.tmpplchld Guantanamo has 114 captives, 53 of them cleared for release to other countries with security assurances. The idea, according to Defense Secretary Ash Carter, is to find a site in the United States for the subset of those 114 “ who, in the interest of our national security, should remain in law of war detention.”tmpplchld Carter, like President Barack Obama, says the current detention operation in Cuba costs too much and is “a rallying cry for jihadi propaganda.” More than 2,000 temporary troops and contractors run the sprawling operation at Guantanamo at an estimated cost of $3.4 million a year per detainee.tmpplchld The state facility under consideration is an empty 948-cell solitary confinement prison at Canon City, about 10 miles northwest of Florence. It is also known as Centennial South, and has been vacant since 2012. The state closed it as unneeded surplus maximum-security cell space after a drop in the state crime rate, according to a 2013 state study.tmpplchld Like the federal prison at Florence, it is part of a multi-prison complex. “The potential for a sale or lease of the facility to another jurisdiction is quite limited due to the location of the facility in the middle of a state correctional complex shared with another facility,” the study said.tmpplchld The team has already visited the Army-run prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and the U.S. Navy brig near Charleston, S.C., over the protests of politicians in those states. Those surveys kicked off renewed opposition to the idea of relocating the detainees to the United States, including by Republican lawmakers from Colorado who suspected the state was on the look-at list.tmpplchld “Transferring some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists to our backyard places a target on Colorado,” Rep. Scott Tipton said in a news release in September.tmpplchld At the Pentagon, Ross said the survey team would “meet with facility staff to discuss the existing facilities, engineering considerations, force protection, troop housing, security, transportation, information security, contracting, and other operational issues. The facilities also will be assessed for their ability to serve as military commission sites.”tmpplchld At this point, the effort is highly theoretical: Current U.S. law flatly forbids bringing any of Guantanamo’s captives to the United States for any reason _ neither for trial nor for medical care _ and the latest draft of the National Defense Authorization Act keeps that embargo, and adds additional restrictions on overseas releases. The House adopted it this week.tmpplchld The White House has said Obama would veto the legislation over its use of war funding as a workaround for spending caps _ and also wants the Congress to loosen up transfer restrictions.tmpplchld tmpplchld ___tmpplchld (c)2015 Miami Heraldtmpplchld Visit Miami Herald at www.miamiherald.comtmpplchld Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.tmpplchld