November 16, 2009 12:37 AM UTC

Gitmo Detainees' Upcoming Trial Puts Supermax Back In News

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• by: Colorado Pols

CBS News:

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said putting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terror suspects on trial in a federal court in Manhattan, as was announced this week by Attorney General Eric Holder, is a bad idea, tantamount to ” ideology run wild.

“We’re going to go back into New York City, the scene of the tragedy on 9/11. We’re now going to rip that wound wide open, and it’s going to stay open for, what – two, three, four years, as we go through the circus of a trial in New York City?” Hoekstra said today on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

He said the defendants and their lawyers will “bring every motion forward that they can” to drag the trial out so they can be at center stage, and that their objective is to make the trial a propaganda show. “Obviously our Attorney General, our legal system, will try to keep it dignified and civil and bring some respect to it,” Hoekstra said. “That’s not what KSM is going to try to do. They’ll do everything they can to disrupt it to make it a circus and allow them to use it as a platform to push their ideology.”

…Hoesktra said giving the “extraordinary” protections of our legal system to those who, he says, “mocked the American system, who want to do everything that they can do to destroy it,” is a bad decision. He also protested the Obama administration’s decision to transfer detainees from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay to prisons on American soil.

“I’m all about problem-solving,” said Hoekstra (left). “What problem is the president going to solve by moving these trials to New York or by moving Gitmo prisoners to Michigan, to Illinois, to Colorado? He hasn’t outlined what problem he’s solving. I don’t see the problem of moving them from Gitmo. It’s been a great place…”

The latest reports suggest a prison in Illinois may be used to house Guantanamo Bay detainees awaiting trial, but Colorado’s ADX Florence (“Supermax”) federal prison remains on a short list of potential long-term incarceration sites for terrorists convicted in civilian courts. Which, as the workers there will tell you, they are entirely capable of handling, just like they handle some of the world’s most notorious convicted terrorists right now.

As far as Pete Hoekstra’s objections to trying them in the United States to begin with…does anyone else find these to be remarkably shallow? We’re going to continue thumbing our noses at all objective standards of international law, handicapping our moral authority around the world–so we don’t have a ‘circus’ in an American courtroom? Seriously, if we didn’t have at least three of those a month, CourtTV would go belly-up.