Don’t look now, but the terrorists are coming — to northwestern Illinois. A nearly-empty maximum security prison located in Thomson, Ill., population 559 and located approximately 55 miles from Platteville, is among the leading candidates to house accused terrorists who are being relocated from Guantanamo Bay. The prison, constructed in 2001 at a cost of $140 million, has room for 1,600 maximum-security and 200 minimum-security prisoners; however, due to budget strains, the prison has remained mostly vacant. In a Nov. 14 article, the Chicago Tribune reported that the prison was holding only 144 inmates.

Predictably, reaction among local residents has been mixed. The promise of jobs has to be weighed with one’s feelings about living mere miles from men who are purportedly some of the most dangerous in the world. There are understandable misgivings about relocating the prisoners roughly 150 miles from the third-largest city in the United States, the second-busiest airport in the world and the tallest building in North America.

Perhaps even more predictable, however, are the dollar signs in the eyes of politicians. “It is worth a lot of jobs to our state. If Thomson Prison is sold to the federal government, it will bring 3,200 new jobs, and about a billion dollars of new income. So part of the deal is we’ve got to get our economy back on track. If Illinois can get a federal prison, maximum security, that is something that’s worth fighting for,” said Ill. Gov. Pat Quinn.

Fellow Democrat, Senator Dick Durbin, is also enthused about the possibilities. “We have an opportunity to bring [jobs] to a part of our state that has been struggling and that’s an opportunity we are not going to miss,” said Durbin.

Some Illinois Republicans, including Reps. Mark Kirk and Don Manullo and 2010 gubernatorial candidate Andy McKenna, have latched on to the issue as a campaign issue and framed the potential move as a threat to national security. Someone might want to let these men know that, as of October, Illinois’ unemployment rate was hovering above 10 percent. There is an impressive amount of chutzpah demonstrated by these politicians, who are sticking to the Republican tactic of a hard line on national security, even when that means turning away thousands of jobs in a meager economy.

Somehow, in the debate of whether national security threats trump the promise of a revived economy, one of the primary concerns that should during a discussion of Guantanamo has been largely ignored — the detainees.

I should probably assume that if any of the Guantanamo detainees came within an arm’s reach of me, I’d surely meet a painful and merciless death; I am an American, after all. But what if any of these prisoners are being held mistakenly, if they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, if they were taken into custody due to faulty intelligence? If any of these prisoners are being held in error, a small slice of the economy is being rebuilt with injustice and dishonesty as its foundation, and that is not an economic recovery worth having.