Missouri Senators At Odds Over Closing Guantanamo Bay

President Barack Obama on Thursday defended his decision to shut down the Cuban-based Guantanamo Bay detention center by January 2010.But questions remain as to where the detainees currently held there will go. Missouri’s two Senators are at odds over the closing of the center, as KSMU’s Jennifer Moore reports.

Standing in front of displays of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, Obama said in his address that 50 of the 240 detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been cleared for transfer to other countries. But that leaves scores of individuals still without places to go. Missouri’s two Senators in Washington are split on Obama’s plans to close the detention center by 2010.Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, supports the idea of shutting it down, saying its reputation as a site of harsh interrogations has hurt the US more than it has helped. She maintains it has become a recruitment tool for terrorists.McCaskill added that while she’s not necessarily proposing that the detainees come to Missouri, she feels confident that the maximum security prisons throughout the US will keep any potentially dangerous individuals from harming Americans.Her Republican colleague in the Senate, Kit Bond, disagrees. He says if allowed into the US prison system, the detainees can "radicalize" the other inmates by sharing their terrorist tactics, and that they can organize and communicate with other terrorists much as gangs operate from prisons.Bond said he’s also concerned that if the detainees are brought back to the US and there is a lack of evidence on hand to convict them, then the US courts are likely to order them released into the community. The senior Senator says he believes the president jumped the gun by announcing the closure of Guantanamo Bay without having a detailed follow-up plan in place.For KSMU News, I’m Jennifer Moore.