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The Biden administration has made no secret of its efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, and a new report from The New York Times suggests the Democratic president and his team are continuing to make progress.
The U.S. military released two brothers on Thursday who had been held as detainees in the war against terrorism for helping to operate safe houses where suspected operatives of Al Qaeda holed up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Pentagon said that Mohammed Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani, 53, and Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, 55, who were never charged with any crimes during 20 years in U.S. custody, were flown to Pakistan in an arrangement with authorities there.
In recent weeks, as congressional Republicans have moved forward with their plans to create a debt ceiling crisis, GOP leaders have routinely said they’re determined to cut wasteful and unnecessary spending.
If they’re sincere about those goals, they might want to start with the prison sometimes known as “Gitmo.”
Revisiting our recent coverage, the prison’s population peaked in 2003 with 680 prisoners. The Bush/Cheney administration began moving detainees out in 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 successfully lowered the prison population 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 32 inmates, down from 40 when Donald Trump left the White House. The cost of keeping the prison open for such a small group of inmates is tough to justify.
About a month after Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, the White House announced plans to shut down the prison once and for all, with the Departments of Defense, State, and Justice planning to work with the White House National Security Council in pursuit of the goal.
The latest developments suggest officials have made some progress, but given Republican intransigence — and indifference to the financial considerations — lowering the number from 32 to zero will remain a difficult challenge for the administration.
This post is a revised version of our related earlier coverage.