As if it’s not enough that the most secure prison in the country is in Colorado and houses some of the country’s worst criminals, now President Obama wants to shut down Guantanamo Bay prison, where the most hardened terrorists are housed, and find a spot for them in the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. The problem is that this gives enemy combatants due process, which is not the current process. To give you a sense of who is already in Colorado’s Supermax, here is a partial list:
- Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber)
- Eric Rudolph (Olympic Park bomber)
- Terry Nichols (Oklahoma City Bomber)
- Zacharias Moussaoui (9/11 perpetrator)
- Ramzi Yousef (1993 World Trade Center bomber)
- Robert Hanssen (spy for Russia/Soviet Union)
Nearly all of Colorado’s elected officials have come out against the measure. Here’s what veteran and U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman told the Denver Post about the plans:
“This is outrageous and I’ll do everything I can to stop it. The Obama administration views terrorist attacks as just another criminal justice problem where terrorists should be afforded all of the due process protections that bringing them onto U.S. soil will provide. These hardened terrorists, who have perverted Islam into a political ideology, are irregular enemy combatants who should be housed at Guantanamo, and not in Colorado or in any other state.”
No decisions have been made yet, but officials in the Obama administration are weighing options including cost and logistics. Opposition to this move by the Obama administration goes beyond Not in My Back Yard, as a January 2015 Rasmussen poll showed that the majority of Americans do not approve of closing Gitmo.
Perhaps the President feels overly-confident about being able to dump some of the the worst human beings in history in Colorado because he won here in 2012, but the truth is that this could become an issue in Colorado in the 2016 Presidential race.