Not in my back yard, dammit

The New York Times has an article by Mark Mazetti and Scott Shane about Guantánamo's detainees:

One day after President Obama ordered that the military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, be shuttered, lawmakers in Washington wrestled with the implications of bringing dozens of the 245 remaining inmates onto American soil. Republican lawmakers, who oppose Mr. Obama’s plan, found a talking point with political appeal. They said closing Guantánamo could allow dangerous terrorists to get off on legal technicalities and be released into quiet neighborhoods across the United States. If the detainees were convicted, the Republicans continued, American prisons housing terrorism suspects could become magnets for attacks.
Meanwhile, none of the Democrats who on Thursday hailed the closing of the detention camp were stepping forward to offer prisons in their districts or states to receive the prisoners. Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, taunted the chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, by suggesting that the authorities reopen Alcatraz Prison in the San Francisco Bay. On Friday, a spokesman for Mrs. Feinstein countered that Alcatraz now was a “national park and tourist attraction, not a functioning prison”, and that the senator “does not consider it a suitable place to house detainees”. But Mrs. Feinstein does believe that some Guantánamo prisoners could be moved to maximum-security civilian or military prisons in the United States, the spokesman said, not naming any specific ones.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in response to a question on Friday that Guantánamo detainees who were moved to the United States “should be held at maximum-security federal facilities wherever they are available.” Like other Democrats queried Friday, Mr. Levin did not specifically address the question of prisoners moving to his state.
One of the first Democrats in Congress to address the not-in-my-backyard issue directly was Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, who told reporters this week that terrorism suspects would be no more dangerous in a secure Pennsylvania prison than they were in Cuba. “There are thousands of dangerous prisoners being held securely behind bars in supermax prisons across the United States,” Mr. Murtha said Friday. He noted, however, that there was no supermax facility in his district.
The number of detainees who may face federal trials— by various estimates, 50 to 100 of the remaining Guantánamo inmates— is tiny by the standards of the federal prison system, which currently holds 201,375 people in 114 facilities, according to Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Those include nine detention centers that hold defendants awaiting trial, twenty-one high-security penitentiaries, and a supersecure prison in Florence, Colorado, where several convicted terrorists are already locked up.
Obama administration officials are beginning to review the files on the remaining detainees at Guantánamo to decide where they should go. Some have been judged not dangerous and cleared for release, but officials have not found a country to take them. Others, including Mr. Mohammed, the chief planner of the September 11th terrorist attacks, will almost certainly face trial, either in a federal or a military court.
But incoming administration officials admit that every option is imperfect. “There aren’t pretty choices for what we have to do with them,” Dennis Blair, the nominee for director of national intelligence, told senators on Thursday. Republican lawmakers have watched these struggles with a certain relish. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said, “As people start getting an indication that they’re going to Kansas, that they’re going to California, that they’re going to Illinois or to Michigan, people are going to say, ‘No, why would we want them here and put them in a general prison population and make our hometowns a target for terrorists?’ ”
Despite speculation about the possibility of moving large numbers of detainees to a single military jail, like those in Leavenworth, Kansas, or Charleston, South Carolina, government officials and legal experts say it is more likely that inmates would be sent to civilian or military facilities across the country. That would reduce the burden on any single location and make each site less of a potential terrorist target.
Sarah Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who led a study of options for closing Guantánamo, said it would be best if detainees facing prosecution were indicted while still at Guantánamo and then moved into federal pretrial facilities in the United States, which routinely house people accused of murder and other dangerous inmates. “We’ve had extremely dangerous terrorists tried in various courts and put away,” Ms. Mendelson said.
Federal courts have convicted 145 people on terrorism-related charges since 2001, according to one review, while the military commissions at Guantánamo have been plagued with delays and legal setbacks. “The Obama administration has to have a little more of a conversation with the American people” about the feasibility of prosecuting terrorism suspects in the United States, she said. “There are plenty of Americans who would want to see some of these guys prosecuted and locked up.”

Rico says Charleston? Maybe Fort Sumter is available; we haven't used that in a hundred and fifty years or so... (And then there's the "oops, we don't know where that airplane full of jihadis went..." solution. Not funny, but cheap.)