It’s no secret that the Obama administration tried to close the Guantanamo Bay prison — a goal that used to enjoy bipartisan support — and it likely would’ve succeeded, were it not for congressional restrictions. It was against this backdrop that the Biden administration announced plans in February 2021 to pick up where the last Democratic team left off.
As the incumbent president prepares to exit the White House, the administration has fallen short of its goal of shutting down the detention facility once and for all, but it’s had great success shrinking the prison’s population to lows unseen in decades. NBC News reported:
The Pentagon said Monday it had transferred 11 Yemeni men to Oman this week after holding them for more than two decades without charge at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The transfer was the latest and biggest push by the Biden administration in its final weeks to clear Guantanamo of the last remaining detainees there who were never charged with a crime.
The prison population at Guantanamo now stands at just 15 people — the fewest since 2002.
What’s more, that total might yet drop further: The Wall Street Journal reported, “The Biden administration is negotiating with the Taliban to exchange Americans detained in Afghanistan for at least one high-profile prisoner alleged to be an Osama bin Laden associate held in Guantanamo Bay.” (The report, which sites an unspecified number of anonymous attendees at a classified House Foreign Affairs committee briefing, has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.)
Revisiting our recent coverage, the prison’s population peaked in 2003 with 680 prisoners. The Bush/Cheney administration began moving detainees out during its second term, and by the time Barack Obama became president, the population was down to 242 prisoners.
In 2009 and 2010, Congress made it effectively impossible for the Democrat to close the facility altogether, but Obama nevertheless successfully lowered the number of people at the facility from 242 to 41.
“As president, I have tried to close Guantanamo,” Obama said in a letter to congressional leaders on his last full day in office. “When I inherited this challenge, it was widely recognized that the facility — which many around the world continue to condemn — needed to close. Unfortunately, what had previously been bipartisan support for closure suddenly became a partisan issue. Despite those politics, we have made progress.”
The point of the progress, obviously, was to reduce the overall population, but it was also intended to appeal to Republicans’ sense of fiscal sanity: The smaller the number of detainees, the harder it becomes to justify the massive expense of keeping open a detention facility that houses so few people.
Even if congressional Republicans are inclined to ignore every other consideration, the hope has long been that GOP lawmakers would at least care about wasteful spending: It costs American taxpayers roughly $13 million per prisoner, per year.
As of today, the facility holds just 15 inmates, down from 40 at the end of Donald Trump’s first term. The cost of keeping the prison open for such a small group of inmates is tough to justify. In fact, The New York Times’ Peter Baker noted, “Gitmo now has 800 troops and civilian contractors for a facility holding just 15 prisoners — 53 guards and other staff members for every detainee.”
Indeed, it’s not uncommon for Republicans to talk with great enthusiasm about the need to cut unnecessary and wasteful government spending. It’s ostensibly the point of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” led in part by GOP mega-donor Elon Musk.
Of course, if the party is serious about such a goal, perhaps it can prove it by agreeing to close this exceedingly expensive detention facility?
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
