The Obama administration's plan to acquire a state-of-the-art maximum security prison in Thomson, Ill., to house terrorist detainees brings the federal government one big step closer to closing the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

No doubt the administration will have a fight on its hands from fear-mongers who claim the move will raise the danger level in this country, but President Obama should not be deterred. Closing Guantanamo will put an end to a sad chapter in American history.

The existence of the detention facility on foreign soil and reports of detainee mistreatment, along with the failure of U.S. authorities to grant them fundamental civil rights at the outset, has damaged America's reputation as a nation devoted to justice. Guantanamo has become a byword for justice denied, a recruiting tool for anti-American extremists eager to win new adherents.

In a commencement speech in 2009, Army Gen. David Petraeus, who oversees U.S. troops throughout the Middle East, said the U.S. military is "beat around the head and shoulders" with images of detainees held in Guantanamo.

He said closing the prison and ensuring that detainees have an appropriate judicial system to deal with their cases would bolster the nation's war effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"I do believe very strongly that we should live our values," he said. "Generations of soldiers have fought to defend those values, and we should not shrink from living them."

Petraeus' reaffirmation of those values should be taken as a rebuke of critics of the decision to close Guantanamo. With fewer than 200 inmates left in that prison — for the first time since February 2002 — the inmate population has diminished to the point where they could be safely housed at the prison in Thomson. Even that number could be reduced as the administration continues to send more prisoners overseas.

The number of inmates who ultimately could be sent to the underused facility at Thomson would be considerably lower than the 350 or so prisoners currently serving sentences for terrorism in several U.S. facilities. That includes those who plotted to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993. The total number of terrorism detainees who would be relocated probably would be no more than 100, according to administration officials.

Most of the 1,600-bed prison at Thomson would remain under civilian control, with the Bureau of Prisons supervising detention of maximum-security criminals. A separate section leased by the Pentagon would hold detainees transferred from Guantanamo.

Obama will miss the Jan. 22 deadline for closing Guantanamo that he established at the beginning of his term, but finding the Illinois site represents major progress.

Harley Lappin, the Bureau of Prisons director, testified the other day that it will take at least six months to open the prison if the federal government succeeds in buying it from the state. He added that a new perimeter fence and other measures would make Thomson Correctional Center "the most secure of all federal prisons in the country."

— The Miami Herald