Gitmo Costs $800K/Year Per Detainee

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.

That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.

Just to put that in perspective, while each Gitmo detainee costs close to a million dollars per person annually, inmates in federal prisons cost about $25,000 per person. Even in our supposed age of austerity, with Republicans demanding cuts to Social Security, Medicaid, and turning Medicare into a voucher plan, there's always money to waste on an elaborate island prison for thirty times the cost it would take to lock people up here.

(Soure)


When will it be time to close this abomination? Let's get rid of the term 'enemy combatant,' and let these people be tried for their crimes instead of detaining them indefintely. Indeed, some have died in this prison without even being tried or convicted of a crime. And the fact that torturing someone does not yeild and valuable intel makes this a sham to begin with.

Wasteful of tax payers money? CHECK
No valuable intel gained? CHECK
Immoral? CHECK
Deaths of people who were never tried or convicted for a crime? CHECK

It'd be cheaper to just let them blow themselves up in whatever asinine attacks they allegedly want to commit.

There very rarely is any cost benefit to incarceration. Unless it was locking Dr Evil up in carbonite or something.

For all of his crazy Hitler has said some pretty profound things. On point here would be: "The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it." In America's (allegedly the most free nation) hysterical and panicked attempt to protect itself from the zealots who "hate us for our freedoms" we've in record time ditched those freedoms and foisted a massive grid of checks, tracking and tyranny all around us.

To fight "tyranny" we've become tyrants.

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


Excellent points. Whether someone is for or against the war that captured those men and regardless of feelings about who did 9/11 or why...We should be able to agree as Americans that what this has turned into at Gitmo is just UN-American and wrong.

Perhaps they deserve to be there, and it's every last one of them. Perhaps they even deserve to die for what they've done, and some likely do. What they don't deserve while in American custody is endless detention without charge, trial or ability to appeal.

Ron Paul is right on this one too. We are either fighting to support and defend the system which made America GREAT, or we're fighting to defend our right to corrupt those values and that system beyond all recognition. Indefinite detention is NOT a 'Great' value, that is for sure.

Whilst I don't agree with Gitmo at all, I'm wondering about the accuracy of the claim of $800k a year per detainee.

For 1 detainee, I can totally envision that cost, but not for 171 of them. It would be interesting to see an official breakdown of the costs Gitmo incur, and not just some website making a statement which has no links to any reference material or sources.

I mean, I could create a website and claim that Gitmo earns $800k a year per detainee,

Just because a page exists, does not mean it is true or accurate, without supporting evidence. Yes, I'm sceptical.

reply to post by BMorris


Read the source, and if that doesn't convince you, do some more research, but it's not exactly a shocking revalation to me when you consider all the fraud waste and abuse of tax payers dollars.

I did read the source, twice, and nowhere are they stating official figures. They are just making an assertation without any evidence to back that assertation up in any way form or function. Sorry.