The arrival of the first Guantanamo detainee in the United States has provoked the expected political backlash. Missouri’s junior senator says people need to calm down.
The presence this week of Ahmed Ghailani for trial in New York has led Ohio Congressman John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, to charge Democrats with planning "to import terrorism into America." Ghailani is charged with being involved in two embassy bombings that killed 224 people. Senator McCaskill says it’s time people took a deep breath about Guantanamo. She says no one in government wants to do anything to endanger the nation and its people. She says she’s hearing some of the same arguments today that she heard 20 years ago as a state legislator when lawmakers argued about what to do with maximum-security prisoners.
"We’re talking about people who are incredibly violent criminals, " she says, "and..in Missouri we’ve managed to lock ’em up tight, and we do not have a problem…"
McCaskill says we’ve had terrorists in Missouri—at the federal prison system medical center in Springfield—and they’ve always been under tight security.