Gitmo Hysteria and Prison Happy Fremont County

Westword

That annoying, low-pitched whine you hear is the bipartisan complaining from Colorado lawmakers, true blue and beet red, all bent out of shape and quaking in their Crocs over a simple little suggestion from the Obama administration to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. That would mean turning its inhabitants over to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons -- and, most likely, the relocation of scores of terrorism suspects to the federal supermax in Colorado.

Holy jihad, Batman. From all the fuss out there, you'd think someone had proposed to ban puppy mills or raise energy severance taxes or something equally unAmerican. You've got a bunch of tough Republican state legislators, like Yuma's Cory Gardner and Ken Kester of Las Animas, fretting like a flock of pantywaists over whether the arrival of so many Gitmo grads in Colorado would "create a magnet for terrorist acts staged to politicize the detention of terrorists in a vulnerable Middle American community." Kester has vowed to fight the move "tooth and nail," which sounds like a scratch-and-hiss little catfight if there ever was one.

And, inexplicably, you've got Mark Udall and Michael Bennett -- both Senators, both Democrats -- thumbing down the proposal, too, agonizing over the implications of housing military detainees in a civilian hoosegow. All of which seems a bit baffling, given the mission and history of the supermax, officially known as the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum: ADX for short.