As the Kos community already knows, Illinois Senate candidate, Mark Kirk, is on a fearmongering mission to stop the detention of former Guantanamo prison inmates, detainees from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, at the super-max federal prison in Thomson, Illinois. He's crying Willis Tower and expecting Illinoisans will get scared and push him right into a Senate seat. Kirk doesn't understand that Illinois is made of stronger stuff, or at least it used to be.
My dad told me this story years ago. It was told to him by a now-deceased longtime resident of Des Plaines, part of which is in Kirk's own congressional district. I remembered the story and asked my dad to reconfirm it to make sure I remembered it correctly, and he did.
As it turns out, Illinois has housed POWs before. During WWII, Des Plaines, Illinois (and possibly some of the rural areas surrounding it) housed German POWs. They weren't put in super-max prisons either. They worked on local truck farms growing vegetables. Now, it's easy for many people to think of these POWs, of German descent, caucasian and Christian, similar to much of the community in which they were housed, as not much of a threat. They were not much more than boys who probably didn't even fully understand Hitler's motives or intentions. However, back then Germany was our mortal enemy. We were fighting the second war, a second world war, against them in two decades. The world's Jewish community and the country of France lost millions of civilians in those wars, and we lost over 300,000 soldiers (100x the number lost on 9/11).
As my dad's friend told the story, some of the POWs came back to the United States after the war, settled down and became citizens, citing that their days working on the truck farms of Des Plaines, Illinois were the best days of their lives.
Here is some corroborating evidence, although the post talks about neighboring suburb, Mt. Prospect, along the Des Plaines River.
Apparently, Illinoisans are holding firm in favor of the prison taking the detainees. My state Senator, Susan Garrett, sent out a poll and sent back the results yesterday. 52% of those polled favored the idea of housing the detainees at the prison in Thomson. However, 52% also favored military trials over civilian trials.