Gitmo North

The Obama administration will announce today that they intend to "acquire" Thomson Correctional Center and will begin transferring Gitmo detainees there as soon as feasibly possible. This is supposedly "good news" as it will bring jobs to the prison and to the area, but as the editors at NRO point out in this excellent post today, national security should not be a "shovel-ready" project.

To refit Thomson for Gitmo detainees will be exorbitantly expensive but that is of little matter to this administration which simply prints money at will:

This exorbitant “injection” of funds would be necessary because TCC is not ready to accommodate international jihadists, who are prone to riot, savagely attack their custodians, attempt escape, and plot terror attacks while in U.S. prisons. The jail would have to be hardened before it could become the new Gitmo. So even if financial considerations were the first-order priority here — and they should not be — the administration’s plan would be inexcusably wasteful. Gitmo has already been hardened, at a cost of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars. It is now a state-of-the-art, Geneva Conventions-compliant detention center. It makes no sense to sink those expenditures down a black hole, spending another fortune on a project that won’t generate sustainable growth. Illinois found that out when it built TCC in the first place.

And, as NRO points out, how long before the ACLU and Human Rights Watch start jumping up and down and protesting the "inhumane" conditions of Thomson? After all, at Gitmo these men are accustomed to specially prepared diets, sensitive handling of the Koran, soccer fields, daily calls to prayer, art and language lessons, and so on. How long before we've recreated the exact same thing at Thomson?

And then what will actually have been accomplished? If you move terrorists from point A to point B and nothing changes, what was the point, except that you spent a lot of money? Does this administration still believe he will gain the "goodwill" of hostile nations by moving these prisoners out of Cuba?

Naive.

And worse, how long before activist judges start releasing them? Most of them can't be tried in regular courts anyway as they are being held under laws of war, not as the result of some criminal investigation?

This is yet another outrage from the Holder Justice Department. It is just shocking to me how destructive this man's policies are. While I recognize the huge differences, this move has echoes of the Mariel boat lift to me, at least the part where Castro emptied his jails and mental asylums and sent his undesirables over here. Yes, there were hardworking Cubans in there as well who just wanted a better life, but there were killers, murderers, terrorists and criminals of all sorts in the mix.

Be very clear about this move - he is importing terrorists onto American soil. Period.

Jake Tapper has more here.