Illinois Prison Will House Gitmo Detainees

The Obama administration notified Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn by letter Tuesday that it intends to acquire a rural prison in his state for the relocation of a "limited number of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
The underutilized Thomson Correctional Center is in the small village of Thomson, Ill., 150 miles east of Chicago. It has become the center of controversy over what to do for a limited number of terrorist suspects, about 200, held at Guantanamo Bay.

Republicans are stomping their feet because that's what they do. It pushes their narrative that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer, which plays to their wingnuts, who go even further, saying Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist. We already have 355 terrorists in prisons all around the nation. It's just politically beneficial for republicans to pitch a fit:

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., blasted the plan to send Guantanamo detainees Thomson. McConnell dubbed the new facility "Gitmo North," and said the administration has failed to explain how it will make the United States safer.

"The American people and a bipartisan majority of the Congress have already rejected bringing terrorists to U.S. soil for long-term detention, and current law prohibits it," McConnell said. USA Today

Terrorists around the nation and not one escapee:

According to data provided by Traci L. Billingsley, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, federal facilities on American soil currently house 216 international terrorists and 139 domestic terrorists. Some of these miscreants have been locked up here since the early 1990s. None of them has escaped. At the most secure prisons, nobody has ever escaped, period. Slate

Illinois governor Pat Quinn says the Thompson Correctional prison will be a maximum security prison for Gitmo detainees. No one has ever escaped a federal prison, he said. Detainees won't be allowed to have visitors. It will create 3,000 jobs in a depressed area of Illinois.

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Gibbs on reporter's suggestion of an Illinois Gitmo. Sometimes our press corps is really disappointing: