Former Guantánamo Officials Blast Waste and Mismanagement As Costs To Taxpayers Top $6 Billion

As U.S. tax­pay­ers pick up a tab of more than $6 bil­lion and climb­ing, for­mer top offi­cials involved in the mil­i­tary com­mis­sion death-penal­ty cas­es against Guantánamo Bay detainees have blast­ed the mil­i­tary tri­bunals for waste, mis­man­age­ment, and ineffectiveness. 

NPR report­ed on the 18^th anniver­sary of the 9/​11 attacks that retired Air Force Col. Gary Brown (pic­tured), the for­mer legal advis­er to the head of Guantánamo’s mil­i­tary com­mis­sions, has filed a whistle­blow­er com­plaint against the Guantánamo Bay mil­i­tary court and deten­tion facil­i­ty alleg­ing ​“gross finan­cial waste” and ​“gross mis­man­age­ment.” Morris Davis, Guantánamo’s chief pros­e­cu­tor from 2005 to 2007, told NPR “[t]here have been bil­lions of dol­lars spent on Guantánamo that were total­ly unnec­es­sary” and crit­i­cized the mil­i­tary com­mis­sions as ​“an overwhelming failure.”

A September 16, 2019 report by the New York Times, in con­junc­tion with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, dis­closed that the Guantánamo Bay prison and mil­i­tary tri­bunals cost tax­pay­ers ​“about $13 mil­lion for each of the 40 pris­on­ers being held there” or a total of $540 mil­lion in 2018 alone. Though offer­ing no solu­tion to the prob­lem, President Donald Trump said on September 18 that the $13 mil­lion per detainee annu­al cost to run Guantánamo was ​“crazy.” ​“It costs a for­tune to oper­ate, and I think it’s crazy,” Trump said.

Currently, eight Guantánamo pris­on­ers have been charged with ter­ror­ism or war crimes, and six of those face pos­si­ble death sen­tences. The death-penal­ty cas­es have long been beset with con­tro­ver­sy. The pre­tri­al pro­ceed­ings in the cap­i­tal tri­al of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of mas­ter­mind­ing the bomb­ing of the U.S. war­ship USS Cole, ground to a halt after the entire civ­il defense team resigned amid charges that the mil­i­tary was ille­gal­ly eaves­drop­ping on priv­i­leged attor­ney-client meet­ings. A fed­er­al appeals court lat­er threw out sev­er­al years of pre­tri­al court orders in the case when the mil­i­tary judge then pre­sid­ing in the case failed to dis­close that his appli­ca­tion to the Justice Department to become an immi­gra­tion judge was pend­ing while he was rul­ing on motions involv­ing Justice Department pros­e­cu­tors in the mil­i­tary commission case. 

Davis says he quit as Guantánamo’s chief pros­e­cu­tor in 2007 after being pres­sured by supe­ri­ors to use evi­dence that had been obtained through years of tor­ture in CIA black sites. A mil­i­tary com­mis­sion judge lat­er barred pros­e­cu­tors from using state­ments the accused 9/​11 plot­ters made to the FBI after hav­ing been tor­tured. Brown’s whistle­blow­er com­plaint alleged that he and Harvey Rishikof, then the con­ven­ing author­i­ty of the mil­i­tary com­mis­sions, were fired from their posi­tions in February 2018 because they were nego­ti­at­ing plea deals to secure con­vic­tions in exchange for drop­ping the death penal­ty against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the oth­er four detainees charged in the 9/​11 attacks. They and defense lawyers have been sharply crit­i­cal of the enor­mous cost of the Guantánamo proceedings. 

NPR reports that U.S. oper­a­tions at Guantánamo have cost a total of $6 bil­lion since the U.S. began using the deten­tion cen­ter in 2002. ​“There have been bil­lions of dol­lars spent on Guantánamo that were total­ly unnec­es­sary,” Davis said. Michel Paradis, a Guantánamo defense lawyer rep­re­sent­ing Al-Nashiri, said “[i]t’s a hor­ri­ble waste of mon­ey. It’s a cat­a­stroph­ic waste of mon­ey.… No mat­ter if you want to see all of these guys shot in the street or whether or not you think Guantánamo itself is an aber­ra­tion that should have closed yes­ter­day — what­ev­er your goal is, the mil­i­tary com­mis­sions have failed to achieve that goal.” 

Brown said that the plea deals would not only have saved mon­ey, but ​“would’ve brought clo­sure to the vic­tims’ fam­i­ly mem­bers, which was our pri­ma­ry con­cern, and it would have poten­tial­ly brought some clo­sure to the wound that Guantánamo is to U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty.” The deal also would have end­ed the lengthy and cost­ly legal process, he said: the 9/​11 defen­dants have been at Guantánamo since 2003, and their tri­als have yet to begin. ​“They haven’t been suc­cess­ful. They’ve stalled. They’re incred­i­bly expen­sive,” Brown said. ​“Instead, would­n’t it be bet­ter if we just said, ​‘You know what? They did­n’t work this time.’”

“October 3 will be the 12-year anniver­sary of the day I resigned,” Davis said, ​“and if you look at what’s hap­pened over the last 12 years, I think you could sum it up as ​‘not much.’ What I wish they would have done was to move these cas­es into fed­er­al court, where they would have been wrapped up years ago and saved the tax­pay­ers a lot of mon­ey.” Cheryl Bormann, an attor­ney for Walid bin Attash, who is accused of train­ing 9/​11 attack­ers, said of the mil­i­tary com­mis­sions, ​“This is ridicu­lous. There’s no rea­son for it. We could secure these men until they died at much less cost and make sure that nobody was ever hurt again.” 

The drawn-out legal process has also tak­en a toll on those whose loved ones were killed on 9/​11. Glenn Morgan lost his father, Richard Morgan, and has trav­eled to Guantánamo twice to watch the mil­i­tary court process. While he said he would pre­fer that the accused con­spir­a­tors be exe­cut­ed, he said a plea deal would at least bring some clo­sure. ​“I’m not say­ing I advo­cate for it, but when some­one in your fam­i­ly is killed like this and your mom is left to fight can­cer on her own with­out her hus­band, your def­i­n­i­tion of sat­is­fied is mod­i­fied,” he said. ​“So I would be sat­is­fied because there would be con­clu­sion. I don’t want there to be no con­clu­sion.” He said he wor­ried that ​“the pris­on­ers will die before they are found guilty,” leav­ing him feel­ing cheat­ed of final­i­ty. ​“They would have not have been found guilty,” he said. ​“They’ll nev­er have been found guilty of mur­der, and they killed over 2,900 peo­ple. And so that would be an injustice.”