Court in a prison plan for detainees

United States Disciplinary Barracks

The Obama Administration is looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the United States to house suspected terrorists, combining military and civilian detention facilities at a single maximum-security prison.

Several senior US officials said the Administration was eyeing a soon-to-be-closed state maximum security prison in Michigan and the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as possible locations for a site to hold the 229 suspected al Qaeda, Taleban and foreign fighters at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

The plans are the latest effort to comply with President Barack Obama's order to close the prison camp by January 22, 2010, and satisfy congressional and public fears about incarcerating terror suspects on American soil.

The White House considers the courtroom-prison complex as the best among a series of bad options, an Administration official said.

To the House of Representatives' Republican leader, it's an "ill-conceived plan" that would bring terrorists into the US despite opposition by Congress and the American people. "The Administration is going to face a severe public backlash unless it shelves this plan and goes back to the drawing board," said Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for Representative John Boehner.

Congress has blocked US$80 million ($120 million) intended to bring the detainees to the US. Legislators want the Administration to say how it plans to make the moves without putting Americans at risk.

The facility would operate as a hybrid prison system jointly run by the Justice Department, the military and the Department of Homeland Security.

Scott Silliman, director of Duke University's Centre on Law, Ethics and National Security, said he doubts the plan would work without Congress' involvement because new laws probably would be needed. Otherwise, "we gain nothing - all we do is create a Guantanamo in Kansas or wherever", Silliman said.

Legal experts said civilian trials held inside the prison could face jury-selection dilemmas in rural areas because of the limited number of potential jurors available.

One solution, Silliman said, would be to bring jurors from elsewhere. But that step, one official said, could also compromise security.

It is unclear whether victims would be allowed into court to watch the trials. Victims and family members have no assumed right under law to attend military commissions, although the Pentagon does allow them to attend hearings at Guantanamo under a random selection process.

As many as an estimated 170 of the detainees now at Guantanamo are unlikely to be prosecuted. Some are considered candidates for release, but the US cannot find foreign countries willing to take them. Almost all have yet to be charged with crimes.

JAIL BLUEPRINT

* Moving all the Guantanamo detainees to a single US prison.
* The Justice Department has identified between 60 and 80 who could be prosecuted. The Pentagon would oversee the detainees who would face trial in military tribunals. The Bureau of Prisons, an arm of the Justice Department, would manage defendants in federal courts.
* Building a court facility within the prison site where military or criminal defendants would be tried which would create a single venue for almost all the criminal defendants, ending the need to transport them elsewhere in the US.
* Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.
* Building immigration detention cells for those ordered released by courts but still behind bars because countries are unwilling to take them.

- AP