Again, just like the Presidential oath, the missing bible, the secret muslims and every other bit of clown-shit insanity they have been spewing of late; I say let them talk. Hand them a megaphone.

I love watching my enemies marginalize themselves into oblivion.

Treat them like their at the kids' table telling knock knock jokes while the adults have a conversation about bettering the country. After all, that's how they're acting.

We grow some criminals in this country that put to shame the most vicious of terrorists, and we can house them. Why don't the republicans pick one of our better prisons, genuinely? I can guarantee you the terrorists won't be going anywhere until due process is served.

If Alcatraz wasn't a park or it wasn't in disrepair you know damn well SalonFranciscans would object for some other reason. Just looking out over the bay every morning while sipping their cappuccinos it would depress and anger them so much thinking about it. I'm sure they would have no problem with suggesting somewhere in the deep south.

any district would welcome the influx of dollars associated with a Federal prison

if the first detainees were war criminals such as bush, cheney, rumsfeld et al.

it could also remain a park; guided tours could be used to edify future generations about the results of abusing power.

i've visited alcatraz once -- gets awfully chilly when the wind's whipping off the golden gate...

that would cost 10x the price of a similar facility on dry land. Out of cultural spite.

Are you suggesting that this somehow makes Democratic San Franciscans exceptional? Name me a Republican community that would open their backyard to such a prison and I'll name you a liar. As the article points out, this issue is all political theater and is producing exactly ZERO helpful solutions. The suggestion that liberals are less likely to want to live next door to prisoners of war is misleading and pathetically dishonest, especially coming from someone who probably cheered an administration that decided to keep them out of the COUNTRY, let alone his backyard.

If:

they weren't terrorists in the first place, but were innocent people illegally kidnapped, tortured, and imprisoned for years..

and they then choose to fight with the only means at their disposal against the people who tortured them..

Does that count as 'recidivism'?

Heck, Connecticut voted solidly blue this time, so maybe teh Republicans will urge that the Guantanomo prisoners be sent to Newgate Prison in Granby, CT, a colonial copper mine where prisoners were held underground until the 1830s!

And that would keep in with the Republican notion about not pampering prisoners.

Except, of course, those found guilty of getting kickbacks on military contracts, bribing congresscreatures, getting bribed, skimming off public money and, of course, bombing abortion clinics. Those guys are a different case.

We all saw how Clint Eastwood escaped easily.

Obviously Colorado's "supermax" is a more practical final destination for those among the Gitmo detainees who are actually terrorists.

The false argument is Republicans claiming that the reason for establishing the prison at Guantanamo was to make sure "them terrorists" couldn't get to the mainland, when in fact the reason was that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld (and presumably Powell) did everything in their power to avoid US law, and therefore created a place outside the US where they felt they could torture and murder anyone they wished. A zone outside any recognizable law other than Bush's murderous will. And because rendering prisoners to Syria to be tortured and exterminated was inconvenient.

Guantanamo was always intended to be a torture and extermination camp from Day 1. It's harder to build such a thing in Kansas and keep people from finding out about it and the conditions there. Since no outside body gets to actually inspect the place in Cuba, it's trivially easy to simply lie about it, and claim the prisoners are treated like princesses.

Bad Math Alert: Alcatraz was shut down, as you say, in 1963. That's more than 45 years ago, not 35.

Oops, good point, thanks for the catch.

The recidivism rates for Republicans are highest still. No matter what happens after their crimes -- impeachment, having to confess to the congregation, resigning the presidency -- the come back to do the same things. This is because, like the presumed terrorists, they believe their truth trumps everything.

I would imagine the recidivism rates among true believing terrorists is 100%, but probably less than 5% of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay are true believer terrorists. That's the thing with Guantanamo: when you're afraid of even having trials, you never find out who's guilty, who's innocent, and who is an "evildoer." Closing Guantanamo does not mean freeing all the inmates: it means treating them like prisoners, having hearings with US law, and finding the guilty from the innocent.

What I find amazing is that the Republicans who say that we cannot have fair trials, lest the guilty say something nasty, are saying, in one breath, that they believe that justice is impossible by American law. Odd, then, that they say also that the death penalty is valid because trials will find the innocent and let them free, every time.

Boehner is stepping up and trying to surpass Jack Kingston as the most idiotic speaker on the Hill, trying to pass Imhoffe as the dumbest man in legislature. He has his work cut out for him, but he believes.

Not that I condone the American prison industrial complex but ... I honestly do not know why state congressional delegations are not lining up to pitch their own states for this juicy prison industrial complex plum. There is about zero chance of any terrorist group successfully springing anyone from a maximum security prison on the American mainland. (How many escapes have there been from Gitmo so far? just as I thought.) I have to think that a lot of depressed rural areas would welcome these jobs.

As a far-left winger, I have to say that I don't think reopening Alcatraz is necessarily a bad idea. Yes, it would be enormously expensive, but I have a hard time believing it would cost more than Gitmo. The money spent would all go to people in the San Francisco area. And I would guess that most of the people in Gitmo don't know how to swim. On it's face, I don't think this is a bad idea. So put a dollar amount on it, write the bill in Congress, and watch John Boehner's head explode.