Pentagon teams studying alternative lockups to Guantanamo Bay visited Fort Leavenworth in Kansas this past week and head to the Charleston, S.C., brig next week as part of spadework for a proposed closing plan that swiftly stirred opposition in Congress.
“Not on my watch will any terrorist be placed in Kansas,” Sen. Pat Roberts, K-Kan., said in a statement issued Friday afternoon. He and Sam Brownback, when he was a senator, first opposed the use of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth for war-on-terrorism captives in 2008, and for a time put a hold on the 2009 appointment of Army Secretary John McHugh over consideration of moving Guantanamo captives to Kansas.
Now Brownback is Kansas governor and still opposes the idea. “The citizens of Kansas do not support moving terrorists to the heartland of America,” he said Friday. And Roberts is championing legislation that would make it tougher to repatriate any of Guantanamo’s last 116 captives or resettle them in other countries, including the 52 long-held prisoners approved for transfer with security arrangements.
Current forbids bringing any of Guantanamo’s captives to the United States for any reason — neither for trial nor for medical care — an embargo the White House blames for soaring costs of the detention center staffed by more than 2,000 troops and federal contractors.
The U.S.-government funded Voice of America first reported about the revived interest in Fort Leavenworth on Thursday. At the Pentagon, Navy Cmdr. Gary Ross said Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter ordered the South Carolina and Kansas site surveys “as part of our broader and ongoing effort to identify locations within the United States that can possibly facilitate military commissions and can possibly hold detainees currently at Guantanamo Bay.”
The analysis will primarily focus on finding humane, maximum-security confinement, Ross said, but will also include costs at a time when the military is trying to plan for long-term medical expenses of a population of foreign captives ages 30 to 67.
Ross also said civilian sites were under consideration but did not specify which ones.
Saturday he added that two newer Pentagon detention facilities in California and Virginia were not on the survey list.
In 2011, San Diego’s Joint Regional Correction Facility, also known as the Miramar Consolidated Naval Brig, grew to accommodate 600 prisoners after a contractor added a $27.6 million, 99,000-square-foot, 200-cell addition to the existing brig with a new health services unit, t kitchen, a visitor’s center and entrance lobby. That same year, the Navy opened a $64 million, 400-cell brig in Chesapeake, Va.
Disclosure of the site survey uncorked a new round of not-in-my-backyard press releases reminiscent of the opposition members of Congress mounted in the early years of the Obama administration, when the Pentagon held twice as many captives at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. Cascading legislation through the years has effectively thwarted President Barack Obama’s pledge to close the detention center, and new legislation supported by the House of Representatives to limit transfers abroad would make it even more difficult.