President Obama will leave office in January having failed to achieve one of his primary objectives, to close the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Just days after taking office in 2009, in one of his first acts as president, Obama signed an executive order requiring the detention facility be shuttered within a year.
Eight years later, it’s still around.
“With respect to Guantanamo, it is true that I have not been able to close the darn thing because of the congressional restrictions that have been placed on us,” Obama lamented at a White House news conference last month.
But he added a caveat: “What is also true is we have greatly reduced the population.”
And it’s upon that slowly dwindling population that rests Obama’s hope that money, not politics, will eventually lead to Gitmo’s demise.
“Our stated goal of closing the prison is still rooted in the idea that closing the prison would be good for taxpayers because it’s prohibitively expensive to continue to run it,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last week, as he noted the latest transfer of a Guantanamo detainee.
Dispatching detainee Shawqi Awad Balzuhair to Cape Verde off the Africa coast this month brought the prison’s population down to 59.
It cost the U.S. $445 million to keep the Guantanamo detention facility running last year, and the White House claims it will need $200 million in additional costs if it’s going to remain open long-term.
Using the $445 million figure and the current population of 59, simple division reveals the cost-per-prisoner to be roughly $7.5 million a year. Nineteen of the current detainees have been cleared for transfer and could be gone by the time President-elect Trump takes office. That would leave 40 hard-core cases, and push the per-prisoner annual cost to more than $11 million.
By comparison, housing a prisoner in a supermax prison in the U.S. costs well under $100,000.
Republicans in Congress have so far been unpersuaded by the financial arguments. But the question is will Trump, the consummate bottom line deal-maker, see it differently.
The president-elect is already showing an unconventional proclivity to intervene on behalf of the taxpayers, lashing out on Twitter over the estimated total program price for a pair of new Air Force One jumbo jets, to be built by Boeing. “Costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!” he tweeted.
“That’s what I’m here for,” Trump said in an interview on NBC last week. “I’m going to negotiate the prices.”
In that same interview, Trump revealed he’s developed what he called “really good chemistry” with Obama and said he takes his suggestions “very seriously.”
“We have a very good dialogue,” he said. “I love getting his ideas.”
That was one day after Obama once again made the case for closing Guantanamo for both military and monetary reasons.
“The politics of fear has led Congress to prevent any detainees from being transferred to prison in the United States, even though, as we speak we imprison dangerous terrorists in our prisons, and we have even dangerous criminals in all of our prisons across the country,” Obama said in a speech at MacDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida.
“Our allies oftentimes will not turn over a terrorist if they think that terrorist could end up in Gitmo,” Obama said. “So we’re wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to keep fewer than 60 people in a detention facility in Cuba.”
A lot depends on how wedded Trump is to his hardline campaign rhetoric in which he unequivocally promised to keep Guantanamo open and to “load it up with bad dudes.”
That was in February, when Obama was talking about making a final push to get Congress to close “once and for all” the detention center and transfer remaining detainees to a prison in the United States.
But in that same February campaign speech, Trump was incredulous over the high price of detaining terror suspects at Guantanamo. “We spend $40 million a month on maintaining this place. Think of it. Now think of it. $40 million a month,” Trump told a cheering crowd.
“I would guarantee you that I could do for a tiny, tiny fraction. I don’t mean like 39, I mean like maybe five, maybe three, maybe like peanuts.”
Trump also suggested he could get Cuba to take over the facility and pay the United States, which indicated, at least back then, he had little understanding of the long-standing dispute over the U.S. occupation of the eastern tip of the island, for which the U.S. sends Cuba annual checks for $4,085 and Cuba refuses to cash in protest.
“He is a businessman, he’s going to look at it,” said Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Korb thinks once Trump is in the White House he may look at several foreign policy questions from a dollars and cents, rather than an ideological, perspective.
“He can say, well you know, I looked at it, and it just doesn’t make a great deal of sense,” Korb said.
But Trump could also bring the per-prisoner cost down by doing what exactly he promised: loading Gitmo up with more terror suspects from the war on the Islamic State.
“The current administration has not captured and lawfully interrogated and detained al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban and ISIS members in large numbers, resulting in a massive loss of intelligence,” said Charles “Cully” Stimson, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, who is at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “I suspect the Trump administration will re-start military detention and lawful interrogations.”
But Stimson, an expert on detainee law, said filling Guantanamo with ISIS prisoners would also invite a legal challenge, based on the argument that the Islamic State doesn’t fit the narrow class of individuals subject to military detention under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
“To be on safer grounds legally, the incoming administration would be prudent to work with Congress to pass an ISIS-specific AUMF, thus giving statutory authority to detain ISIS members as law of war detainees,” Stimson said.
The new president would also need an act of Congress to close the prison.
The latest version of the National Defense Authorization Act extends prohibitions related to Guantanamo Bay previously enacted by Congress, including a ban on spending any money to transfer or house detainees in the U.S. and restrictions that bar sending any prisoners back to Libya, Somalia, Syria or Yemen.
Meanwhile, this administration is doing everything it can to leave as few prisoners as possible, so as to make to make Guantanamo as expensive as possible.
“That’s a policy that we will pursue until Jan. 20th as long as President Obama remains the president of the United States,” White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said last month.
And what if, after they are released they return to the battlefield?
The recently retired U.S. Southern Command chief, and President-elect Trump’s nominee for homeland security secretary, former Gen. John Kelly, had a ready answer to that question, when he was asked in January.
“I mean, if they go back to the fight, we’ll probably kill them. So that’s a good thing.”
