South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Thursday that tourists will no longer visit Charleston if the Pentagon moves Gitmo detainees to the military brig there.
“Who’s going to come vacation in a state that’s known to house terrorists?” the Republican governor told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency.
“You just, as a mom, you don’t take your children anywhere near [where] there could be a threat,” she said.
Haley said major companies, such as Boeing, will also move out of her state and further hurt the economy because they don’t want to operate in the same state where former Gitmo detainees are housed.
The administration presented a plan this year to close the detention center in Cuba by moving detainees, who can’t be released, to the United States. Pentagon officials visited three sites in the U.S. last year to work up cost estimates of transferring detainees, including Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, a super-max prison in Colorado and the naval brig in Charleston.
President Obama has said that closing Gitmo could save taxpayers millions of dollars, and Democrats on the committee on Thursday stressed that Gitmo had “served its purpose and must be closed.”
But Haley said there’s no amount of money worth scarring South Carolina’s residents, who she said are still reeling from a terrorist-inspired attack last year.
“Cost simply doesn’t matter to me. You could pay the state of South Carolina to host these terrorists and we wouldn’t take them for any amount of money. There is no price worth the fear this reckless idea would strike in the hearts of the people in my state,” she said.
Haley also said her objection is not just to moving terrorists to her home state. She would help any governor fighting to keep terrorists out of their backyard.
She also pushed back on administration assertions that closing Gitmo would eliminate its use in terrorist propaganda, saying that any so-called “Gitmo North” would still be used in propaganda and would be a target for terrorist and lone wolf attacks.
Republican lawmakers on the committee raised several questions about moving Gitmo detainees to the U.S. that were not addressed in the administration’s plan, including how detainees would be transferred for medical care and where they would go to trial. In the case of South Carolina, they also speculated about where detainees would be evacuated in the case of a hurricane.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., said he called the hearing to hear from those who would be affected on the the ground, rather than members of the military who he said must support the commander in chief because of the chain of command.
“Their credibility in this regard unfortunately has to be questioned,” he said.
