Aside from the security concerns in bringing terrorists into the homeland and the questions over the precedents set by granting Constitutional rights to enemy combatants, is anyone asking about the physical pricetag for Obama's Folly?
Illinois State Sen. John O. Jones raises some
interesting points.
“Our minimum price for Thomson should be $1 billion; it will cost more than $80 million to pay off the existing debt for Thomson and another $200 million or more to build another correctional center,”
A billion dollars is a tad excessive, but what will the cost of the property and a replacement facility be to state and federal taxpayers? A couple hundred million? More?
I've heard figures from 3,800 to 10,000 new jobs bandied about. And that new single family homes would be built and sold to prison employees. So, if the feds are going to hire 4-10,000 new civilians, with good wages and benefits plus the cost of the facility and security upgrades, what is this doing to the budget in poor economic times?
According to the
State of Illinois, the current cost per inmate is about $44 grand to house a Total Average Daily Population of 144
Average Annual Cost Per Inmate: $43,803.00
Obama proposes putting as many as a hundred terrorists here. At the
current level of security, that would raise the cost to as much as $63,000 per inmate, but I imagine that security would be (should be) enhanced for this type of inmate.
Daniel Foster notes
The facility sits beside the Mississippi River, five miles south of a a municipal airport and one mile north of the West Carroll School District.
And they tell me we already
had a facility in Guantanamo, maintained by the military, housed in military barracks, who we presume are
not going to be laid off when the facility moves. (Or is reduced in population)
Since Obama has been running up debt like it was Monopoly® money, I don't think that Obama will be deterred in making this largely empty symbolic gesture.
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This is all international eye wash. They should have set up a journalist hotel on Gitmo and invited in the IRCC observers and gave them free run of the place.
ReplyDeleteI was stationed at a prison in Southern Iraq and the place was stinky with Euro observers looking down their noses at us as they used our facilities and ate our food...
I think that when all is said and done, the detainees will be complaining bitterly that they never had it so good as they did at Guantanamo!
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