A group of 64 terrorist suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and defined as too dangerous ever to be set free have been earmarked for transfer to a military prison in the US.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, is one of them.
Ash Carter, the defence secretary, announced yesterday that Fort Leavenworth in Kansas was one of the options under consideration, along with a US navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina — provoking outrage in both states. Under US law, the Pentagon is barred from transferring any of the detainees to an American prison.
Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, said: “They’re wasting their time. We are absolutely drawing a line. We are not going to allow South Carolina to become a magnet for terrorists.”
President Obama is determined to close the detention centre in Cuba before he leaves office in January 2017, and the White House has been pressurising Mr Carter, who has the final say over Guantanamo detainee transfers, to come up with a plan to relocate the 116 inmates. A total of 52 of them have already been approved for transfer to foreign countries.
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The 64 most dangerous detainees will have to stay at the controversial camp until a way can be found to relocate them in the US.
Fort Leavenworth, a maximum security prison, holds Robert Bales, an American soldier convicted of killing 16 civilians in Afghanistan in 2012, and Chelsea Manning, formerly Private Bradley Manning, who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks.
In his statement on the planned closure of the Guantanamo prison, Mr Carter said it remained “a rallying cry for jihadist propaganda”. It costs the US $3 million a year for each Guantanamo detainee, compared with $34,000 for someone held in a maximum security prison in the US.