So desperate is President Barack Obama to keep a campaign promise to close the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center that he apparently is prepared to put Americans at risk if that is what it takes.

Despite bipartisan opposition to the idea, Obama continues to pursue the possibility of closing the Guantanamo Bay center and moving its terrorist suspects to the mainland United States.

Defense Department officials have been visiting sites where the prisoners could be transferred. Among them are a medium-security federal prison in Colorado, that state’s penitentiary, the Army’s Disciplinary Brig at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; and the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, S.C.

You read correctly: The White House is prepared to house terrorist suspects in jails normally used for soldiers and sailors who go AWOL. That failing, a medium-security prison may do.

This is crazy. Terrorist suspects were sent to Guantanamo Bay originally because it is a highly secure facility. Anyone managing to get out of the center itself would have nowhere to go but the ocean.

Congress should set its foot down over Guantanamo Bay, with an act making it impossible – even if that bans one of Obama’s famous executive orders – to put Americans in jeopardy by closing the detention center and transferring dangerous inmates to the mainland.