As Pentagon officials tour sites in the US in search for an alternative to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, skittish lawmakers are growing more defensive over their home turfs.
This week, as scout teams for the Department of Defense prepared to visit the consolidated Naval Brig in Charleston, S.C., the state’s junior Senator announced he would be tagging along–and not to provide encouragement.
“Sen. Scott will be attending parts of the tour and will be conveying his beliefs to the surveying team that Charleston is not the place where these dangerous terrorists should be housed,” a spokesperson for Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) told The Hill. The staffer also told the paper that Scott believes Gitmo detainees “should not be housed on US soil at all.”
Pentagon officials tasked with exploring the possibility of moving Gitmo detainees toured the Charleston site on Wednesday. Last month, they visited the facility at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
Both states’ respective Republican governors have since come out against any plans to bring detainees to the US, relying on “not in my backyard” arguments to make their case.
“Simply put, we do not want them in our states,” wrote Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in a letter last month to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter. “Please know that we will take any action within our power to make sure no Guantanamo Bay detainees are transferred to South Carolina or Kansas,” they added.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) has also penned an op-ed railing against the possible transfer of Gitmo prisoners to the US.
Speaking to reporters in August, Carter claimed that the department has not settled on any location yet.
“This does not mean that either of these sites will be chosen,” he cautioned, referring to Kansas and South Carolina, and adding that the Pentagon “will also be assessing other locations in coming weeks.”
Despite the heated debate over the roughly 50 Gitmo detainees who are not eligible for transfer, hundreds of convicted terrorists are already serving prisons sentences across the US with few public gripes from lawmakers or anyone else.
A 2011 survey conducted by the Federal Bureau of Prisons found that there were more than 362 inmates convicted of terrorism charges, including the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, and would-be 2010 Times Square bomber Faizel Shahzad.
