One day before President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo Bay, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) said he would be willing to facilitate the process by bringing some of the detainees into his district. “Sure, I’d take them,” Murtha said. “I mean, they’re no more dangerous in a prison in my district than they are in Guantanamo.”

Fox News’s Glenn Beck called Murtha a “clown” yesterday because of the proposal. But Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, may have won top prize for the most absurd reaction. Calling the idea “ludicrous,” Gramley’s main complaint seems to be that the al Qaeda suspects will indoctrinate the other American inmates:

“I don’t think the average murderer or rapist hates all Americans or hates what America stands for like the terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo,” said Gramley, who lives in Venango County. “You intermix them with the prison population, and there’s the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison.”

While one local chamber of commerce president said he does not “see any downside” to Murtha’s idea because it would mean bringing jobs to the area, Pentagon officials are eying other military prisons in South Carolina, Kansas, and California.

But Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) have expressed strong reservations at housing former Gitmo detainees in their state. South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R) said the Obama White House “should be ready for a fight” if it decides to move the terror suspects to South Carolina. “Transferring detainees from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. soil will endanger American lives,” DeMint said.

However, defense experts have stated the opposite, that the Guantanamo debacle has led directly to American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. But also, former Gitmo detainees will be locked in maximum security prisons and would pose no more danger than some of America’s most dangerous inmates:

– CNN senior analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted, “We have a legal system in this country that has tried Zacarias Moussaoui. It has tried the blind sheik. We have had terrorism trials. These people are in prison. Our legal system is completely capable.”

– “We have thousands of prisoners incarcerated who are as evil, violent and uncontrollable as I imagine any of the terrorist detainees are,” said Joseph Bobak, a local PA professor of criminology and forensic science.

Yet, facts like these don’t stop conservatives from making “absurd” arguments in favor of keeping Guantanamo open for business indefinitely.

Earlier this week on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Russell Tice revealed that the agency had “monitored all communications” of Americans — specifically targeting journalists. To discuss this development, Olbermann yesterday hosted Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who famously angered the Bush administration by revealing the government’s domestic wiretapping program and its secret snooping on the financial records of thousands of Americans allegedly linked to terrorists.

Since that time, the Bush Justice Department had been trying to identify Risen’s sources for his book on the nation’s spy agencies, called State of War. In April, the New York Times reported that former government officials had been called before a grand jury and confronted with phone records documenting their calls with Risen. Neither Risen nor the New York Times had received a subpoena for those records.

Risen told Olbermann that in light of Tice’s revelations, he believes he may have been a target of the NSA’s journalist-spying program:

OLBERMANN: Do you believe you have been a target of this NSA wiretap program?

RISEN: What I know for a fact is that the Bush administration got my phone records. Whether that was obtained by the FBI or the NSA, my lawyers and I have been trying to investigate that. We’re not sure. But we know for a fact that they showed my phone records to other people in the federal grand jury. And we have asked the court to investigate that.

Risen added that he believes the purpose of the NSA’s efforts was to “have a chilling effect on potential whistle blowers in the government, to make them realize that there is a big brother out there that will get them if they step out of line.” Watch it:

Transcript: Read more

Yesterday, President Obama signed an executive order banning the use of torture in all military and CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists. The order specifically revoked the legal memos written by the Bush administration to justify the use of torture on detainees.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorializes that Obama “wants to have it both ways on torture,” saying he will ban it but simultaneously carve out legal loopholes for coercive techniques to be used in an emergency:

The unfine print of Mr. Obama’s order is that he’s allowed room for what might be called a Jack Bauer exception. It creates a committee to study whether the Field Manual techniques are too limiting “when employed by departments or agencies outside the military.” The Attorney General, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Director of National Intelligence-designate Dennis Blair will report back and offer “additional or different guidance for other departments or agencies.” [...]

The “special task force” may well grant the CIA more legal freedom to squeeze information out of terrorists when it could keep the country safe.

Despite the Wall Street Journal’s foreboding intonations, Obama made it clear yesterday that the era of coercive interrogations had come to an end. Speaking to the State Department he said firmly, “I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.”

News organizations appeared skeptical of Obama’s torture ban. The LA Times and the Washington Post noted that Obama “appeared to leave an opening for the CIA to again have expanded authority,” but administration officials insisted that the commission set to review interrogation and detention policies was not a loophole to allow the use of torture:

Administration officials emphasized that there was no intent to create a loophole.

“This is not a secret annex that allows us to bring the enhanced interrogation techniques back,” said a senior Obama administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing legal strategies. “It’s not.”

An administration official emphasized to the Washington Post, “We’re not talking about different techniques.”

The New York Times reports that “the emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.”

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Back in November, the Times had this story on the jihadist rehabilitation program, which apparently didn’t take with al-Shihri. Though the Times notes that Al Qaeda in Yemen “has been reinforced by foreign fighters,” it does not point out that some of those fighters, including some involved in the September attack, were returned fighters from Iraq.

Shahri was picked up in Pakistan in 2001, and shipped to Guantanamo in early 2002 after spending a month and a half in a hospital, recovering from wounds from an air strike. Pentagon documents charge Shihri with participation in “military operations against the United States and its coalition partners,” stating that he was an “Al Qaeda travel facilitator” who helped arrange travel to Afghanistan via Iran, that he trained in “urban warfare” in a camp north of Kabul, and that he attempted to assassinate a writer.

Asked about the Times story, CAP’s Ken Gude responded that “it is impossible to guarantee that no detainees released from Guantanamo will ever join up with terrorists or commit violent acts. The Obama admininstration must do all that it can to prevent this from occuring, but the chances are likely that it will.”

But you cannot assess the dangers of Guantanamo simply by looking at a handful of released detainees and whether they participate in terrorism. Guantanamo’s existence has driven far more individuals into al Qaeda’s ranks than those who could join the fight after being released.

And the Iraq war provided an environment in which to train them. Contrary to what conservatives will inevitably insist, the story of Said Ali al-Shihri doesn’t argues for abandoning the effort to close Guantanamo (it’s unknown whether al-Shihri’s Gitmo stint further radicalized him, as it has other detainees), but for a more competent and responsible process for dealing with detainees. More importantly, given the apparent ease with which al-Shihri was able to hook up with an Iraq-fed Al Qaeda affiliate after his release, it argues for a counter-terrorism policy that doesn’t actually fan the flames of extremism in the Middle East, as the Bush administration’s did.