Hanahan, SC - Some states are fighting to bring Gitmo detainees to their backyards for money and jobs, but is South Carolina one of them?

Al Queda sleeper agent Ali al-Marri spent six years in Hanahan's naval brig. al-Marri was transferred to Illinois earlier this year. Meanwhile, President Obama is pushing to close Gitmo, which houses the country's terror suspects.

But South Carolina politicians don’t want the more than 200 detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba moved here to the naval weapons station.

“It makes no sense to move some of the most hardened terrorists in the world from a safe place in Guantanamo where we have about 300 million invested in a facility where they can be held and tried and move them to places like Charleston,” U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (web | news | bio) said.

“We need to isolate the American citizenship from these guys. These guys weren’t picked up at a Sunday school picnic, they were picked up trying to kill as many Americans as they can, and they still want to do that,” U.S. Representative Henry Brown said.

But economically strapped states like Illinois are jumping for the chance to bring the detainees there because of the jobs and money they bring. Even still, South Carolina's leaders say ‘no way.’

“I don’t see the advantage to trade maybe a few jobs for the kind of security risks we would have. I think we can do better with companies like Boeing than prison jobs,” DeMint said.

Several other state lawmakers are on the same side of the fence this time, hoping to keep the detainees out of the palmetto state.

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