By Barb Shelly, Kansas City Star editorial page columnist
A colleague just asked if I thought Sam Brownback was displaying a double standard.
Yea, sort of.
The U.S. Senator s expected to travel to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., tomorrow to assert that he doesn't want detainees from Guantanamo Bay brought to the military prison there. But he put out a press release celebrating the selection of Manhattan, Kan., as the site of a new national facility where scientists will study diseases that are potential threats to agriculture and livestock.
Pathogens good. Detainees bad.
I think Brownback is right to throw his support behind Kansas as the site for the new federal bio-lab. It will be a huge economic boost to the state and scientists have made a convincing case that the facility can be made safe.
But Brownback should have the same measure of confidence in the brig at Fort Leavenworth, the military's only domestic national-security prison. Where better to bring the detainees if Gitmo is shut down?
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Closing GITMO in order to
Closing GITMO in order to house the detainees here at Leavenworth is not just a bad idea, it s a horriblly naive idea. There is a reason the detainees are in GITMO, by not housing them in the US they are not granted the same legal protections that we Americans are granted. The supreme court decision in Boumediene gurantees that the detainees in GITMO are given more rights than the average American Citizen.
We need to stop worrying about where they are detained and develop a legitimate system of preventative detention and trial that stops short of the norms prevailing in American federal courts. The law of war not criminal law should govern the detainees and if this is the case housing them in a federal prison becomes unacceptable.
Keep GITMO open until the congress of the US establishes a legal framework to deal with the detainees and keep them out of Leavenworth at all cost.
Actually, it is a double
Actually, it is a double slap to Leavenworth, because LV had been in the running with an NBAF proposal of their own in the beginning