Cuba No Libre

Aside from the pleasurable schadenfreude of knowing that we hold a piece of turf on Castro's island paradise, what purpose was served by maintaining a United States military base at Guantánamo Bay?  Certainly it offers a well-isolated locale for storing people we prefer not be close enough to good Americans to get a whiff of the scent of torture or hear the screams.

And isn't that a good enough reason?

Only if you have the deep pockets to pay for the waterfront land.  The cost per prisoner at Gitmo would be far more than needed to put up an enemy combatant in the finest hotel on a leeward island for life.  And what are the chances that anyone would want to bomb a country who provided free room service, liquor included?  From Reuters via Doug Berman:

The Pentagon estimates it spends about $150 million each year to operate the prison and military court system at the U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, which was set up 11 years ago to house foreign terrorism suspects. With 166 inmates currently in custody, that amounts to an annual cost of $903,614 per prisoner.

By comparison, super-maximum security prisons in the United States spend about $60,000 to $70,000 at most to house their inmates, analysts say. And the average cost across all federal prisons is about $30,000, they say.

It's worth repeating: the annual cost per prisoner, without even getting into the nasty details like human beings not charged with any offense, not convicted of any offense, not there because of any credible evidence they are the enemy combatants they've been called, or even mentioning the "T" word that John Yoo says is cool with him, is $903,614.  Did you realize how much it costs the United States to keep these guys?

Not that it's really needed, but the Reuters article provides a bit of context, courtesy of the American Progress think tank:

Just one inmate from Guantanamo, for example, is equivalent to the cost of 12 weeks of White House tours for the public - a treasured tradition that the Secret Service says costs $74,000 a week and that has been axed under sequestration.

A single inmate is also the equivalent of keeping open the control tower at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport for 45 months. That control tower, another victim of cuts, costs $20,000 per month to run.

The $900,000 also matches the funding for nearly seven states to help serve home delivered meals to the elderly. Sequestration has cost Meals on Wheels a median shortfall of $129,497 per state, the organization says.

Or measured in terms of military spending and national security, the cost of four inmates represents the cost of training an Air Force fighter pilot - based on the Department of Defense's figure of $3.6 million per pilot.

It costs us $3.6 million to train an Air Force fighter pilot?  Seriously? But I digress.

Remember when America launched Son of Iraq War to rid a former ally that had nothing to do with 9/11 of weapons of mass destruction, using the tactic discussed ad nauseum on cable television of Shock and Awe that relied heavily on Bunker Buster Bombs, because any tyrant with WMDs would hide out in a secret bunker?  Some wag revealed the cost of a BBB at $14.6 million per bomb, and we were dropping them on Iraq!  Had we just dropped bags of money, we likely could have accomplished at least as much, if not more, plus given our economy a far better boost.

For all this money thrown into a black hole from which nothing good emerges, we've achieved a remarkably poor return on investment.  According to the Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, he never got a piña colada for his troubles.  Complaining to the management did not good, especially while they were not customer service oriented.

I barely finished my meal, when all of a sudden [ ? ? ? ? ?] and I heard a commotion, guards cursing loudly, “I told you, motherfucker …,” people banging the floor violently with heavy boots, dog barking, doors closed loudly. I froze in my seat. [ ? ? ? ? ?] went speechless. We were staring at each other, not knowing what was going on. My heart was pounding because I knew a detainee was going to be hurt. Yes, and the detainee was me.

That's no way to run a Caribbean paradise.  It's no way to run a prison.  It's no way to run a naval base. It's no way to treat human beings, no matter how much we hate them or how much we spend on them.

Had the federal government spent this money on a control tower in Arkansas, liberals would be calling for revolution.  Had it been spent on Meals on Wheels, conservatives would be oiling up their assault rifles.  But since we spend over $900,000 on Gitmo detainees, no one says a word.

The rallying cry is Freedom isn't Free. It's a much better maxim than Freedom costs $903,614 per prisoner.  I just thought you should know.







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