newjerseynewsroom.com

BY TOM HESTER SR.

NEWJERSEYNEWROOM.COM

Thirty Assembly Republicans are supporting a newly-introduced resolution that calls on the federal government and the Corzine administration to keep prisoners housed at Guantanamo Bay out of New Jersey.

The lawmakers do not want to see terrorists imprisoned or freed, given medical care or transported in New Jersey.

In January, President Obama issued an executive order to shut down, within one year, Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba that holds hundreds of terrorists. Several states - California, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia - already have passed resolutions to prevent the relocation of prisoners within their borders.

On Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller warned Congress that detainees could fuel terrorism if they are transferred to United States soil. The threat that terrorists would provide financing and radicalize others, Mueller warned, would exist even they were held in maximum-security prisons on the US mainland.

"I am pleased to stand with so many colleagues in the Legislature to oppose New Jersey ever becoming the drop-off destination for some of the world's worst terrorists - including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal orchestrator of the 9/11 attacks, Ramzi bin al Shibh, a key al-Qaeda member who planned the 9/11 attacks, and other enemies detained at Guantanamo," said Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris), a prime sponsor of the measure. "Housing detainees at New Jersey military bases or prisons would just make our soldiers and surrounding communities magnets for terrorist plots - Fort Dix, after all, already has been the target of a terrorist plot.''

Deirdre Fedkenheuer, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections, said she knows of no plan to house federal prisoners in state prisons. There is a federal prison in Fairton, Cumberland County.

"New Jersey's national landmarks, ports, chemical plants, and oil refineries all would become tempting targets for attackers intent on killing civilians in our state,'' Webber said. "And the New Jersey families of the victims of the September 11 attacks should not be forced to endure having terrorism's most hardened killers housed in our state."

During World War II, Nazi army prisoners were held at old Camp Kilmer in Edison.