The cost of Gitmo
by digby
There are a whole lot of intangible costs to keeping Guantanamo open, not the least of which is the ongoing damage it is doing to American notions of justice and its reputation in the world. But there's an outsized financial cost as well:
Congress spent $1.42 billion on Guantanamo when all Guantanamo detainees could have been held in existing U.S. prisons for a cost of $29.9 million.
The current Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2014 would likely save U.S. taxpayers billions by easing the restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantanamo. The portion of this legislation that would make it easier to move out those already cleared for transfer would save almost $2 billion in the next budget cycle.
A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Guantanamo is not just a horrible stain on the US Constitution. It's a drain on US resources as well. But I won't be all that surprised if many of the prisoners in it die of old age.
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