Friday, May 22, 2009

Gitmo For Your Dollar By Recycling, Reuse.

If you want to start a heated conversation, mention Gitmo. It provokes strong feelings. It has been in the news a lot this week. The new president promised to close this off shore prision. He is finding that to be a little more complex than issuing the executive order.
There are some questions that come to my mind about Guantanamo. How come we still have possession of a base in Cuba? Why does it cost 80million$$$ to close it? How much do we pay Fidel to break that lease?
When it comes to moving these detainees out of Cuba even those who opposed keeping them off-shore don't want them to come to their home state. I feel the same way. I live in a prision town. Years ago we had Muriel boatlift Cuban criminals languishing here for years. In a special arrangement with the federal government, Stillwater State Penitentiary housed men we didn't know what to do with. We couldn't return them. We couldn't let them loose. Locals are not comfortable with some of these Al Qaida terrorists doing time in their state. Who wants the possibility of their terrorist buddies trying to free them? The government answer is to put them in Supermax prisons. Today's paper says there is only one available bed in the Supermax prison outside of Denver. My question, couldn't we just say we put them there and house them in Area 51 in Nevada? No one gets in there. No one gets any information about that place. Don't rumors say that is where the "aliens" are? Aren't they aliens? If that didn't work, we must have some abandoned nucleur underground silos in North Dakota we could adapt. Hopefully, they haven't been converted to Bed & Breakfasts. Thirty feet of concrete should be enough to secure the badest of the bad and with the wide open spaces of Dakota they would see the attack coming if Al Qaida came to town.

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