A cry of "not in my backyard" is growing louder over where to relocate terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay once the military-run prison is closed.
"We're the new Guantanamo Bay if they move to Indiana and what does that mean for us?" said Republican state Senator Marlin Stutzman, who wants detainees kept away from the prison in Terre Haute, site of the federal execution chamber.
"Does it make us a target? I don't know how their (terrorism) networks work but I'm sure they keep track of where their buddies are at," he said.
Resolutions in a few states that are home to federal or military prisons call for the detainees to be sent anywhere but there, fearing those states will become magnets for terrorism.
The Guantanamo prison opened in 2002 at the US naval base on Cuba and has been widely condemned by rights groups and foreign governments as failing to meet basic legal standards.
President Barack Obama, in one of his first official acts after taking office, ordered it closed by the end of the year and suspended the military tribunals substituting as courts.
If the detainees are relocated onto US soil, "they'll be clamoring for their rights," said Randy Brogdon, an Oklahoma Republican state senator who is behind a resolution seeking to bar the detainees from Fort Sill in his state.
"Let's send them to the country they came from. The problem is, they won't take them back," he added.
Sixty of some 500 Guantanamo detainees previously released have been unable to leave because their home countries refuse to accept them, said Navy Commander J.D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman.
The military has tried to resettle them in third-party countries, but so far has had limited success, with a total of five Uighurs from restive western China sent to Albania in 2006.
'YESTERDAY'S FIGHT'
Kansas' Democratic Governor Kathleen Sebelius, in a January 28 letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, said she supported Guantanamo's closing but listed a host of reasons why Fort Leavenworth was unsuitable for the detainees. She has not received a reply, her spokesman said.
Lawmakers in Oklahoma, South Carolina, Colorado, Georgia and California have also initiated protests.
The administration is aware of the local backlash, the Pentagon spokesman said. The Pentagon, the White House, the Justice Department, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security will hold an interagency review to determine what to do with the remaining 245 detainees, he said.
In Colorado, home to the federal "Supermax" prison housing the most dangerous U.S. inmates, a spokesman for Democratic Governor Bill Ritter called a Republican petition drive to block detainees a stunt to embarrass the Obama administration.
"Republican lawmakers ... don't want to see Guantanamo closed. They're fighting yesterday's fight ... They're just making political partisan noise," spokesman Evan Dreyer said.
Brogdon, a champion of states' rights, and other Republican legislators said they were expressing legitimate security concerns -- though their protests may carry little weight.
"Congress has the authority to establish federal prisons and situate them. It's hard to see how a state can veto a particular prison," said Northwestern University law professor Robert Bennett. "There are plenty of dangerous people in these prisons without these prisoners from Guantanamo."
Out of 201,000 federal inmates, just 94 are jailed for violations of national security. Most of the rest were convicted of drug, weapons and immigration offenses, with some 12,000 serving sentences for murder, kidnapping or sex crimes.