Dan Calabrese

Talk to Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, and you can sense how much it’s killing him not to be able to tell you what he knows.

If we knew what he knows . . .

Specifically, Hoekstra is privy to classified intelligence about the Guantanamo Bay detainees who are headed for Thomson Correction Facility just outside Thomson, Illinois. These are the people the Obama Administration assures us pose no danger to the American people because they are going to be in maximum-security facilities.

That argument may sound convincing on the surface, but Hoekstra warns that the people who are buying into it – including the local community officials and even the Illinois congressional delegation – don’t know everything they need to know.

“The public doesn’t really know who these people are,” Hoekstra said in a Monday afternoon interview with The North Star National. “They don’t know what they’ve done. I’ve seen the profiles of many of these people. I know who they are. I know what they’ve done and I know why we haven’t sent them back anywhere else in the world.”

Because the information he has is classified, Hoekstra is not able to go into much detail about what these 200-some detainees have been doing at Guantanamo Bay. But one thing he makes clear is that their efforts to kill Americans did not stop when they arrived at Gitmo, and that’s going to present challenges you don’t face with your typical prisoner – even with a serial killer.

“I can’t give you the profile of someone who is on murderers row and is serving a life sentence versus a jihadist, and how you might hold them differently,” Hoekstra said. “But talking with experts, they said it’s two very, very different problems. In 99 percent of the cases, these radical jihadists will behave differently. They’re still invested in killing Americans. It’s not like they’ve been arrested and convicted and given a life sentence for a fit of rage where they killed their neighbor. These people are still committed to destroying the American system and killing Americans.”

And they just might get a first-hand opportunity to do that in Thomson. While their actual guards will almost certainly be U.S. military personnel, the Obama Administration has promised that the federal government would bring – and pay for – as many as 3,800 new jobs to the community as part of the agreement for Thomson to host the Gitmo detainees. What kinds of jobs will those be?

“They may hire locals to work in the kitchen, do laundry and those types of things,” Hoekstra said.

Thomson residents, are you sure you want those jobs? Consider: The vast majority of Gitmo detainees have already been released or sent back to other countries. Why not these guys? Because, as Hoekstra – who has read their profiles – explains, they are “the worst of the worst.”

“To get to Gitmo, you had to go through all kinds of steps,” Hoekstra said. “You had to be picked up on the battlefield or in a threatening situation. Then the decision had to be made that we were going to take you out of the country and maybe send you to a different detention facility. For a lot of the people in Iraq or Afghanistan, they were put in facilities in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they stayed there or were maybe released. But a lot of these guys were selected for this special treatment.”

That could be because they were in possession of a particular kind of intelligence. Or it could be because they posed a particular kind of threat. Even so, of the more than 500 people who have been sent to Gitmo at one time or another, more than 300 have already been sent elsewhere. Those remaining are the 200 most problematic detainees.

And they’re the ones who are coming to Illinois.

Of course, many critics of Gitmo and of Bush Administration anti-terror policies claim there is no certainty that these guys are really terrorists at all. They claim that the U.S. simply rounded people up without really being sure who they were, sometimes on the word of local bounty hunters who were getting paid to deliver heads to them.

Hoekstra, having seen their files, says that’s nonsense.

“The people who are left there have been screened and screened pretty well,” Hoekstra said. “Does that mean it’s impossible to have made a mistake? No. There could have been a mistake with some of these people. But I’m very confident that there weren’t.”

It is a frustrating exercise for Hoekstra to try to sound this warning, because it’s obvious the most convincing information he has is the very information he can’t share. He will make an effort on Tuesday to convince the Intelligence Committee that they should clue in the Illinois congressional delegation about the kinds of people who will soon be their guests.

I asked him to speculate about the reaction of the Illinois congressional delegation if they knew what Hoekstra knows.

“I believe that it would give pause to the people in the Illinois delegation,” Hoekstra said. “But I think it would give even more pause to the people of Illinois if they knew who these people are, if they know what our experience was with them at Gitmo. They’d be very reluctant.”

But Hoekstra isn’t allowed to say what he knows. And the Obama Administration, which knows everything Hoekstra knows, apparently doesn’t care.

Update: House Democrats have just denied Hoekstra’s request that the intelligence on the Gitmo detainees be made available to the Illinois congressional delegation.

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