I have blogged before about the silly argument that US prisons cannot handle terrorists (hint: they already do). But there is another issue here. Even if Congress can refuse to pay for closing GITMO and transferring these prisoners, I'm not sure they can block the actual transfer.

The way I see it, GITMO is a military base. The detainees are held by the US military. Therefore, as CIC, Obama could order them transferred to any military installation that he sees fit, sans any Congresssional approval.

This is already happening:

Meanwhile, an Obama administration official said that the administration plans to announce Thursday that a top al-Qaida suspect held at Guantanamo Bay will be sent to New York for trial.

Ahmed Ghailani would be the first Guantanamo detainee brought to the U.S., and the first to face trial in a civilian criminal court.

My guess is that Obama is playing a long game here. He lets Congress play NIMBY leading up to the mid-term elections. This keeps their constituents happy and prevents any seat losses over what is, in reality, a silly issue.

In the meantime the administration will quietly scale back the camp. A few detainees will be released, a few will be tried in US courts, a few in military tribunals. By 2010, Obama's set date to close the GITMO camp, it will have already outlived its usefulness with the Dem Congressional majority intact.

There has been a lot of silly talk lately about how US prisons are ill-equipped to handle GITMO detainees. This is demonstrably false on many levels, but a 2007 article about Colorado's Supermax facility caught my eye when I saw a familiar name: former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

From CNN:

 

Visiting Supermax, the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," reveals nothing so much as an astonishing and eerie quiet.

It's not what one would expect of a place that houses 473 notorious terrorists, vicious murderers and violent, disruptive escape-prone inmates brought in from other federal penitentiaries.

I've visited noisy, boisterous state and federal prisons, where inmates scream for a visitor's attention or proclaim their innocence.

But at Supermax -- officially called "Administrative Maximum," or ADX -- everything is very tightly controlled, with nothing left to chance, so there is no particular sense of a threat, no feeling of vulnerability.

Prison officials also have been bugged by rumors that the penitentiary was not entirely safe and secure, and that the lack of adequate staffing and a perimeter fence were potential problems to the community.

Bureau officials insist allegations of inadequate security were fueled by corrections labor unions wanting more staffing, but complaints caught the attention of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Colorado Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard, all of whom visited.

In the end, it was agreed that a $10 million perimeter fence wasn't needed.

Bureau of Prisons officials stressed that 95 percent of the Supermax prisoners are the most violent, disruptive and escape-prone inmates from other federal prisons, and they were transferred to ADX to help control those other facilities. At ADX, every prisoner has his own 86-square-foot cell.

Despite the brutal nature and violent history of most of the inmates, not a single major assault against a corrections officer has occurred since the first inmates arrived in 1994.

And before you argue that these prisoners are less dangerous than the GITMO guys:

The handful of journalists allowed in were not allowed to see the headline-grabbing terrorists isolated under specially designed procedures. We didn't get a glimpse of Zacharias Moussaoui, Ramzi Yousef, Richard Reid, Theodore Kaczynski or Terry Nichols.

And apparently so as not to fuel inner terrorist fires, the newspapers from September 11 that will eventually reach the al Qaeda members and sympathizers imprisoned here will be altered. It will be 30 days before they finally have access to the 9/11 papers, and then they will find that all articles dealing with the anniversary or terrorism will have been excised.

So the next time your GOP buddy tells you that US prisons can't take the terrorists, refer them to Wayne Allard, Ken Salazar, and Alberto Gonzales, none of whom can be accused of being soft on crime.