GOP wants promise on prison

The Obama administration has all but officially abandoned a proposal to turn a vacant Illinois state prison into a facility for suspected terrorists now held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

But senior Republican lawmakers said that before they voted on a budget request to acquire and renovate the prison for ordinary federal inmates, they wanted a guarantee -- in writing from the president -- that the White House will not change its mind and later transfer terrorism suspects there.

“The money is not in our budget, and we will not put that money in our budget ... because then they would move detainees up from Guantanamo Bay,” said Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that will consider the funding request next month.

Rich Carter, a spokesman for Republican Rep. Donald Manzullo of Illinois, whose district includes the Thomson Correctional Center, said both the federal Bureau of Prisons and northwestern Illinois would suffer if the White House failed to give such an assurance, thus forcing rejection of the funding.

“We are trying to get them to officially, formally back off,” Carter said. “Members of Congress are extremely reluctant to spend any money on the prison if there’s any possibility at all that the administration still has the desire” to hold suspected terrorists there.

Obama has promised since his 2008 campaign that he will close the Guantanamo Bay prison, and in the last two years his administration has continued to say it is seeking a way to do that.

But a senior administration official recently acknowledged that the White House didn’t see “a path” toward using the Thomson facility to house suspected terrorists. A top Bureau of Prisons official said the agency had been informally advised that the White House no longer viewed the prison as a viable option for such prisoners.

The administration had no immediate comment Wednesday on whether Obama would formally announce that the White House was bowing out of its plans for Thomson.

But time is running out. On March 15, Wolf’s subcommittee is to hear from federal prison officials on their budget request for $140.5 million to start running three new facilities, including Thomson.

The Illinois prison, which was built by the state, has never been used to its full capacity. It would add as many as 1,600 high-security cells to a federal system that is already 52% over capacity among male inmates.

“We could make very good use of Thomson,” said one senior bureau official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The administration has offered other hints that it no longer wants to use Thomson for suspected terrorists, moving away from an initial proposal in 2009 for split use of the facility.

Deputy Atty. Gen. James Cole told lawmakers at a Feb. 14 briefing that “right now, all our plans for Thomson are just for federal prisoners.”

At a Senate hearing three days later, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said prospects for closing Guantanamo Bay were “very, very low” given the breadth of opposition in Congress.

Still, Manzullo said qualifiers from the administration -- such as “right now” and “very, very low” -- raise the possibility that the White House could reverse course once Thomson was funded and open.

“With Republicans taking over the House this year,” Manzullo said, “the prospects are dead” for transferring terrorists into the U.S. “The administration should acknowledge this political reality,” he said.

richard.serrano @latimes.com

Times staff writer Christi Parsons contributed to this report.