There has been considerable fretting lately about the possibility that terrorists might be transferred from the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the “Supermax” facility in Colorado. Most of the fretters have been Republicans, in Congress and the state legislature, although some Democrats have chimed in too.
But the possibility of terrorists coming to town doesn’t seem to faze the people who actually live in the prison’s neighborhood.
They’re cool with it. In fact, they’re much more concerned about the possible closing of the women’s prison at Cañon City.
As former District Attorney John Anderson wrote in a letter to the editor of the Cañon City Daily Record last week, “We can handle ourselves.”
It was another former district attorney, Gov. Bill Ritter, who suggested that the prison at Florence was intended for just this sort of prisoner. Republican state legislators jumped all over him, citing the “real threat” and warning that “the public’s safety is at stake.”
They backed off a little after Ritter said in his monthly interview with talk radio host Mike Rosen that, OK, maybe “some other place” would be better — Pakistan, for example. The state Senate press office issued a statement saying “Republicans applaud Ritter’s change of tune on Gitmo detainees.”
Other Democrats, including Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, have not been so accepting of President Barack Obama’s order to close Gitmo within a year — not if it means having terrorists transferred to their states.
But Republicans like Colorado Springs Congressman Doug Lamborn suggest a likely political motive for spreading this fear. It’s a way to attack Obama.
Lamborn, who introduced a bill in Congress to deny funds to transfer the prisoners, has said he doesn’t know where the terrorist suspects should go. If Obama wants to close Guantanamo, he said, let him figure it out. “That’s up to the president,” he was reported as saying. “It was his idea to close Guantanamo.”
In Supermax’s home town, meanwhile, they’re hardly talking about it, says Linda Smith, director of the Florence Chamber of Commerce. Ritter’s raising the possibility of closing the women’s prison at Cañon City is of much more concern.
Prisons are a huge piece of Fremont County’s economic base, with more than a dozen prisons, state and federal. They’re “a definite benefit to the community,” Smith said. They provide jobs and shoppers for stores in downtown Florence.
If a few more terrorists come to the prison down the road, “we’ll deal with it,” she said. “We’ve lived and grown up with it . . . . It’s just kind of everyday to us.”
It’s not as though there aren’t already some pretty bad guys at Florence. More than half of its inmates have killed other inmates at other prisons, or guards, or other members of the correctional system, including judges.
Most of them are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. For the remaining hour, they can exercise alone in a separate chamber. There is no communal dining, recreation or religious services. Prisoners rarely even see one another, so there’s almost no opportunity for hatching terrorist plots.
Among the more notable residents at Supermax have been Zacarias Moussaoui, conspirator in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; three terrorists involved in the earlier, 1993 bomb plot at the World Trade Center; “Shoe Bomber” Richard Reid; and domestic terrorist Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski.
“Generally, outsiders are shocked that the locals aren’t continually terrified,” said Bob Cooper, publisher of the Florence Citizen newspaper, in an e-mail. “I have a feeling that many journalists who come here looking for that story are sadly disappointed when they don’t find us cowering in the corners.”
Fred Brown (punditfwb@aol.com), retired Capitol Bureau chief for The Denver Post, is also a political analyst for 9News.
