WASHINGTON -- South Carolina lawmakers are mobilizing against the possible transfer of terrorist suspects from the Guantánamo Bay military prison to the Charleston naval brig under President-elect Barack Obama's pledge to close the controversial U.S. facility in Cuba.

Rep. Henry Brown, a Republican whose 1st Congressional District includes the Consolidated Naval Brig, introduced a bill Wednesday that would block the use of federal funds to move Guantánamo detainees to Charleston.

''Bringing these extremely dangerous war criminals, deemed too high of a threat to be sent home, would add an unnecessary terrorist threat to our community,'' Brown said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican who played a leading role in establishing military commissions at Guantánamo, also opposes holding any or all of its 250 remaining detainees in the Charleston brig.

''It doesn't make sense to hold them in an urban center like Charleston,'' Graham said. ``We should recognize that where they are detained will automatically become a terrorist target.''

Obama in recent days has said that fulfilling his campaign vow to shut down the U.S. prison camps in southeast Cuba will be an early priority after he takes office Jan. 20.

''I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantánamo, and I will follow through on that,'' Obama told CBS News. ``I have said repeatedly that America doesn't torture, and I am going to make sure that we don't torture. Those (steps) are part and parcel of an effort to regain America's moral stature in the world.''

Brad Berenson, a former White House lawyer under Bush who worked with Obama on the Harvard Law Review almost two decades ago, said the new president will likely come to appreciate the many legal and logistical complexities of closing the prison camps.

''During the campaign, it may have been easy to criticize the Guantánamo detentions at a high level of generality,'' Berenson said. ``But once elected, the president has to answer the question of what to do with specific people about whom we know specific things.''

One complexity is that the U.S. government has cleared more than 60 of the Guantánamo detainees for release, but the U.S. is seeking agreements with foreign nations to resettle them.

Ali al Marri, a Qatar native, has been held for 5 years in almost total isolation at the Navy brig in Charleston. He has challenged his detention in a case now before the Supreme Court.

''The idea of treating him as a military prisoner who can be held indefinitely without charge or trial is a ludicrous and unprincipled assertion of executive detention power,'' said Jonathan Hafetz, an American Civil Liberties Union who is representing Marri.

Hafetz, who has visited Marri in the Charleston brig more than a dozen times, said he will be disappointed if Obama closes Guantánamo and transfers its detainees to other prisons.

``That would be putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound,''Hafetz said. ``The way to end it is simply to terminate the failed system.''

Even if Obama makes shuttering Guantánamo one of his first acts as president, Pentagon sources say it would take at least two years to prepare another site to house its detainees and accompanying scores of U.S. military and intelligence officials.

President Bush set up the Guantánamo Bay prison camps for terrorist suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan the following month.

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