HoodaThunk?

I wonder how Rep Murtha’s (D-PA) constituents feel about his volunteering to import known terrorists into their neighborhoods.

Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., says he’d be willing to house prisoners from Guantanamo Bay in his congressional district if President Obama makes good on a plan to close the U.S. prison there.

As one of his first acts in office, the president circulated a draft Wednesday that would shut down Guantanamo Bay within a year.

Murtha only has a minimum security prison in his district. But he says he’d have no reservations about holding detainees there in a maximum security prison.

“Sure, I’d take ‘em,” said Murtha, an outspoken critic of the Iraq war. “They’re no more dangerous in my district than in Guantanamo.”

Well, that’s just a load of drivel. There are no Pennsylvania towns at Gitmo and should these terrorists escape their confinement there’s no where for them to go but the sea. Not so in PA’s 12th District. Major interstate highways span this area and there’s a damn sight more civilians they can prey upon in the Keystone State than in the US base in Cuba. Objectively and obviously speaking, they are considerably more dangerous in Murtha’s district than in Guantanamo.

Of course, Murtha could be just angling to get the feds to build a shiny new maximum-security prison in his district. If that’s the case, I think a year to close Gitmo is going to be as fast as they can go. If they use the same crews to build the prison as they’ve been using to do highway maintenance, it could take longer than that. Still, smells like grandstanding to me.