Associated Press
WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is proposing a $200 million fund to help pay for security costs in cities hosting the trials of accused terrorists such as Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The money will be included in a budget plan for 2011 of roughly $3.7 trillion that President Barack Obama will submit to Congress on Monday, a congressional aide said Saturday. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the spending blueprint hasn't been announced.
The administration said late last year the trials would take place in federal court in lower Manhattan, near where the World Trade Center once stood. But there's growing opposition from the city, and it now seems likely that the White House will decide to hold the trial elsewhere.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has put the cost of tighter security at $216 million just for the first year after Mohammed and the others were to arrive from the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. New York City officials had warned of massive gridlock in lower Manhattan due to the extraordinary security steps that would have been required to host the trial.
Options for alternative trial sites include the northern Virginia city of Alexandria, which hosted the 2006 sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who pled guilty to helping plan the 9/11 attacks.
Republicans have led the opposition to hosting Guantanamo detainee trials in the U.S.
But other states such as Illinois would welcome the detainees since holding them is a source of federally funded jobs. Democrats controlling the state government want to sell a prison in the rural northwest portion of the state to the federal government to house Guantanamo detainees.
Despite his promise to take on the deficit, Obama's budget submission for the upcoming year is shaping up as a mostly stand-pat blueprint -- like most presidents propose during election years.
"It is critical that we rein in the budget deficits we've been accumulating for far too long," Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.
"Deficits that won't just burden our children and grandchildren, but could damage our markets, drive up our interest rates, and jeopardize our recovery right now."
But Obama's $3.7 trillion or so budget plan for 2011 to be released Monday won't offer politically dangerous cuts to costly federal benefit programs that are driving massive budget deficits, administration and congressional officials say. Nor will it propose broad-based tax hikes that could help close extraordinary budget deficits requiring the government to borrow almost 40 cents for every dollar it spends this year.
Just Saturday, a Treasury official said Obama's budget proposal will also call for the repeal of a widely ignored tax on the personal use of company-issued cell phones and other mobile devices. A 1989 law -- passed when cell phones were considered a luxury -- says that personal use of a company cell phone should be taxed like other fringe benefits, such as a company car.
