Illinois prison break started with half-hearted phone call

Once upon a springtime, when Barack Obama was still on his presidential honeymoon and half the nation was giddy, the White House had a festering problem called Guantanamo.

The issue back in May wasn't really Guantanamo, a strategic American military base on the eastern tip of Cuba that has served our interests well. The problem was what to do with the prisoners held there as terrorists.

So as the tulips were blooming outside, I happened to run across some information about the Thomson state prison in western Illinois. Not only was the brand new $140 million facility empty, but it had never been occupied - the result of Illinois' typical government ham-fisted ineptness.

So, almost on a whim, I filled this space with a suggestion that Thomson prison be turned over to the feds.

"As President Obama fights to carry out his campaign promise to close down the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison camp in Cuba, he has the perfect place to relocate those detainees who are too dangerous to be freed. It's right here in his home state, but far enough from the Hyde Park White House that he sometimes visits," I wrote.

Mayor Duke Hebeler out in Thomson, a small town in Carroll County, wasn't very happy about that big prison sitting vacant since 2001. With all of the jobs and related benefits in limbo for eight years, I figured he might be open to my suggestion that the keys be handed over to the United States of America.

Besides, anybody able to hold onto the nickname Duke (for baseball great Duke Snyder) into his 60s had to be a good interview.

So I gave him a call and asked if he and the Thomson townsfolk would be OK with nasty al-Qaida types housed in their prison.

At first Duke Hebeler didn't say a word and I thought he was either going to hang up or start laughing at the suggestion. But he did neither. Instead, he said that they would welcome the terrorist prisoners if it meant the long-dormant prison would open.

"They can't be any worse than any murderer," he told me. "It's maximum security. It's for that."

Of course, some of them are probably murderers, especially those who remain in the custody of this administration.

Well, the tulips came and went; the Cubs and White Sox folded and we survived a summer of dismal weather; Patti Blagojevich lost her reality show while Rod is still in the running; the Olympics are now Brazil's and the Bears might as well be.

But two things haven't changed since May 25 when Mayor Duke was quoted in this column inviting terror-prisoners to the Thomson prison:

1. The Obama administration still needs a place to put Gitmo terrorists.

2. The Thomson prison is still vacant.

So when Mayor Duke wrote a letter to Sen. Dick Durbin suggesting that the prison be considered as an alternative for Guantanamo detainees, the gears started cranking.

"We not only read (the letter)," Durbin said in the first of a series of Illinois news conferences, "we took it to heart."

If the prison does end up housing Gitmo detainees, it will put on a political pedestal and hailed as a win-win-win-win:

• Gov. Pat Quinn will win an operating Thomson facility without using any state funds and may actually make money from it.

• Sen. Durbin will win President Obama's unending support for solving one of the administration's biggest problems.

• A hundred Gitmo detainees will win accommodations in a brand new facility with good Midwestern cooking.

• Mayor Duke's constituents will win news jobs and businesses will flourish.

And so, with Gov. Pat and Sen. Durbin floating an optimistic new prison plan out there like a bobber on Potter's Marsh, maybe Mayor Duke should retract something else he told me last spring.

Duke said there'd been so many false starts and broken promises since the prison was finished in 2001 that he'd like to put the politicians behind bars.

"I can't go in and lock up all of them, as much as I'd like. I don't believe any of 'em no more," he said.

Then again, with federal officials touring the Thomson facility today, maybe Mayor Duke should wait awhile to cut bait.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by e-mail at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie