Hardin, the new Gitmo?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

CNN:

The tiny town of Hardin, Montana, is offering an answer to a very thorny question: Where should the nation put terror detainees if the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is shut down by the end of the year as President Obama has pledged?

Hardin, population 3,400, sits in the southeast corner of Montana, in the state's poorest county. Its small downtown is almost deserted at midday. The Dollar Store is going out of business. The Hardin Mini Mall is already shut. The town needs jobs -- and fast.

Hardin borrowed $27 million through bonds to build the Two Rivers Regional Correctional Facility in hopes of creating new employment opportunities. The jail was ready for prisoners two years ago, but has yet to house a single prisoner.

People here say politics in the capital of Helena has kept it empty. But the city council last month voted 5-0 to back a proposal to bring Gitmo detainees -- some of the most hardened terrorists in the world -- to the facility.

"It would bring jobs. Believe it or not, it would even bring hope and opportunity," Greg Smith, Hardin's economic development director, told CNN.

Jobs. Hope. Opportunity. With so many of America's elected officials cowardly trying to pass the buck, the good people of Hardin, Montana are admirably stepping up to the plate to address this pressing problem.

Now, I'll admit, I wouldn't want hardened terrorists (and there ought to be fair trials to determine which ones are truly such terrorists and which ones aren't) in my community, even in some Supermax prison, but, then, I wouldn't want to live in a community with such a facility anyway. But what's so admirable about Hardin's proposal is that it makes sense for Hardin. So if the people of Hardin want to take on this responsibility, why not let them? They've volunteered. And it may just help them pull themselves out of their economic malaise.

But will it happen? Probably not:

The state's congressional leaders have lined up against the plan. "Housing potential terrorists in Montana is not good for our state," Max Baucus, the state's senior Democratic senator, wrote to Smith. "These people stop at nothing. Their primary goal in life, and death, is to destroy America."

Well, that may be true, if somewhat of a simplistic exaggeration -- they're human beings, after all, not super-human monsters, and the matter of who they are and what they want in life is far more complex than Baucus suggests -- but "housing" isn't really the right word for what would be done to them in Montana. That makes it seem like they'd be put in halfway houses and let out on furloughs. They wouldn't be housed, they'd be, as they are now, incarcerated in what would surely be turned into a super-maximum security prison. And whatever their primary goals, it would be awfully difficult for them to "destroy America" from behind the walls and bars of that prison.

Of course, it isn't just up to Hardin. Many others, and not just Baucus and his colleagues in Congress, will have to weigh in. And it may very well be determined that moving the detainees to Hardin just isn't a great idea. But it should at least be taken seriously, not least because no one else seems to want them.

Hey, if it could really bring hope and opportunity to this depressed part of America, why not?