Silence from Hoekstra on bomber’s detention in civilian prison

Our colleague Spencer Ackerman, the foreign policy and terrorism correspondent for the Washington Independent, posed an interesting question on the TWI blog yesterday contrasting how Rep. Pete Hoekstra is reacting to the attempted bombing of an airplane as it landed in Detroit and how he reacted to giving any other alleged terrorist a civilian trial.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Ackerman writes, “is being detained and questioned in a federal prison in Michigan.” And in fact, he has been indicted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. “If convicted,” Ackerman points out, “he’ll be imprisoned in a federal prison. A federal civilian prison. Just like the one that Republican politicians said would leave American communities vulnerable if Guantanamo detainees were sent there.”

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), for instance, started telling residents of Standish, Mich., things that “really scared the heck” out of them after the Obama administration considered moving Guantanamo detainees to the federal prison there. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kans.) boasted about shutting down the Senate over an administration plan to move the detainees to the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kans. Both the Standish and the Leavenworth plans were dropped. But now here’s a real live aspiring terrorist — indeed, Hoekstra tweeted that the Northwest incident was “a terrorist attack” even though it failed — going to a real live federal prison on actual American soil and … nothing.

Curious indeed. Shouldn’t Rep. Hoekstra be demanding for Abdulmutallab what he has demanded for Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and every other person detained on terrorism charges over the last few years, that he be sent to Gitmo and detained indefinitely without trial and kept as far away from American soil as possible out of concern for public safety?

Not that it would surprise me if Hoekstra did call for that, but I’m curious to know why he’s not doing so, at least publicly. If the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom were rounded up and arrested based on little more than hearsay and tips that the U.S. government paid people to give in Afghanistan, are too dangerous to be allowed on American soil and given a civilian trial, surely that reasoning applies even more strongly to a man who was actually caught in the act of trying to blow up an airliner, right?

Or — perhaps — all of that talk of such grave danger was just politically convenient fear-mongering.