Three cheers for Dick Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois.
Rather than offering shrill, partisan talking points at the prospect of closing the Guantanamo prison—equal parts Islamic extremist recruiting tool and human rights stain on our national psyche—Senator Durbin has consistently offered a pragmatic, progressive voice that is steadfast in its resolve to close Gitmo while ensuring the security of the country. The result is today’s announcement that the administration will likely open the detention facility in Thompson, Illinois as the destination for many of Guantanamo’s detainees.
When conservatives were doing their best Chicken Little impersonation about the alleged perils of bringing hardened terrorists to American soil, Durbin rebuffed Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, calmly telling NBC’s David Gregory on Meet the Press that:
Continuing Guantanamo, unfortunately, makes our troops less safe. The bottom line as I see it is Guantanamo should close in an orderly way. … The fact is that closing Guantanamo, that announcement by the president, as well as abandoning torture techniques and so-called enhanced interrogation, finally said to the rest of the world that it’s a new day. Join us in a new approach to keeping this world and America safe. I think it was a break from the past we desperately needed. …
[W]hen we checked with the director of FBI, Mr. Mueller, he said there’s no question that supermax facilities, not a single escape, we limit the communication of these detainees and prisoners, and we can continue to do that. …
I’d be OK with them in a supermax facility, because we’ve never had an escape from one. And as I said, we have over 340 convicted terrorists now being held safely in our prisons. I just don’t hear anyone suggesting releasing them or sending them to another country. That isn’t part of the prospect that we have before us. …
With this stance, Durbin shows how rational solutions are hardly mutually exclusive from either American values or safety: closing Guantanamo is a moral and security imperative, and the idea that America’s well-being is threatened by terrorists in supermax facilities is nothing more than a political scare tactic.
And as a result of Durbin’s sensible position, it looks like job-starved Illinois will be rewarded in the process. The state will retro-fit the empty Thompson prison to meet the new security standards, and then have to staff the facility once open. Thompson sits in Carroll County, IL, where unemployment rests at 11.1 percent; a refurbished facility could bring as many as 3,000 jobs.
And though this is anecdotal evidence, I asked Mike Satlak—my college buddy, an Oswego, IL resident, and in the interest of full disclosure, a Dick Durbin fan—about the prospect of moving prisoners to rural Illinois. “I’m not scared at all of any security threat, I live 120 miles from Thompson and it could really use the jobs.”
