Where are all the Republicans and Conservatives now? They argued and they picketed over the issue of over-spending in Washington, but when it comes to the expenditures that the Bush Administration racked regarding Gitmo Prison on Guantanamo Bay, the Conservatives are curiously missing in action.
A report claims that for each prisoner housed at Gitmo, American taxpayers dole out $800,000.00 a year!
Guards get combat pay, just like troops in Afghanistan, without the risk of being blown up. Some commanders get to bring their families to this war-on-terror deployment. And each captive gets $38.45 worth of food a day.
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.
It’s still funded as an open-ended battlefield necessity, although the last prisoner arrived in March 2008. But it functions more like a gated community in an American suburb than a forward-operating base in one of Afghanistan’s violent provinces.
Congress, charged now with cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Christmas, provided $139 million to operate the center last year, and has made every effort to keep it open — even as a former deputy commander of the detention center calls it “expensive” and “inefficient.”
Not only is Gitmo “expensive” and “inefficient,” it is also one of the main reasons America has lost its reputation of a just and fair nation around the world. When pictures of the tortured and mistreated detainees surfaced, our perceived moral superiority in the world faded, and the pictures were used by terrorists to foster more hate against the United States.
You will be correct to assume that this wasteful money vacuüm called Gitmo, would be the foundation for the Teaparty/Republicans/Conservatives, rallying cry against unnecessary government spending. But they, of course, could not substantiate that arguement.
If Gitmo was the brainchild of a Democratic president and this same report surfaced, the Teaparty would have chartered boats, swam, anything and everything possible to get their members to the Cuban island. They would have shown up carrying misspelled signs calling attention to the wasteful spending of the Federal government.
This would have been covered by Fox News, and the ridiculously high amount of money spent every year since 2002 on the small amount of prisoners, would have been the viral talking point of every personality on the Fake News agency. But Gitmo is not the brainchild of a Democratic president, it is the creation of a Republican president, and that is where the so-called Conservatives draw their line determining which type of administration gets their approval for “government spending.”
If its done by a Republican, then it’s okay. Republicans call it “necessary spending” – a valiant effort to keep the nation safe. But no matter how they try to spin it, $800,000.00 per prisoner is insanity, and if anyone is really concerned about government spending, it will make sense to close this prison and use these funds in a more productive way, like say – here in America.
