Obama aide: Under new Gitmo plan, some detainees would be sent to U.S.

Dawn arrives at the now closed Camp X-Ray, which was used as the first detention facility for suspected militants captured after the Sept. 11 attacks, at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba in 2013. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP)

President Obama’s top counterterrorism advisor said today the White House is about to launch a new effort to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, citing escalating costs that is forcing the U.S. government to spend $3 million a year to house and care each of the 116 remaining detainees.

Speaking at the Aspen Security Conference, deputy national security advisor Lisa Monaco said the White House is drafting a plan to close the prison that it will present shortly to Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Among its details: stepping up transfers of 52 detainees who have been deemed eligible for release to other countries, while moving the rest to Supermax prisons in the United States or to military prisons where they will be tried before military commissions.

“That doesn’t mean just unlocking the door and have somebody go willy-nilly to another country,” Monaco said about the planned transfer of detainees to overseas countries. “It means a painstaking establishment of security protocols that would govern the transfer of that individual.

“Let’s look at this,” Monaco added. “Why hand over this albatross to the president’s successor?”

Lisa Monaco, deputy national security advisor, said the planned transfer of detainees would involve the painstaking establishment of security protocols. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/AP)

President Obama announced plans to shut down Guantanamo on his first full day of office. But he has been consistently thwarted by Congress, which has barred him by law from transferring any detainees into the U.S.

And there were signs today Republican opposition remains strong, on the heels of news reports that two former Guantanamo detainees were arrested in Belgium on charges of recruiting foreign fighters to go to Syria.

Rep. Mike McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told a panel here today that he remains unalterably opposed to the president’s efforts, saying the detainees left at Guantanamo are “the worst of the worst.”

But the White House picked up renewed support from McCain who, speaking after Monaco, called Guantanamo “a blot on the honor of the United States of America,” although he acknowledged that closing it “is a lot more complicated than it initially appears.” McCain said he wanted “to appeal to my fiscal conservative friends that you have to save taxpayers a couple of” million dollars a year.

Monaco’s remarks suggested that the case for closing the prison has shifted to a fiscal argument. As the number of detainees has steadily declined — from 242 when Obama took office to its current population of less than half of that — the per-capita costs of keeping the prison open have increased substantially.

“Today, right now,” she said, the government is spending “$3 million per detainee, per year, to house them in Guantanamo. We can be spending that money on a host of national security threats that we’ve been talking about all week.”

The White House has indicated it will veto a new national defense authorization act if it includes restrictions on transferring detainees to the U.S. Asked twice whether the president, after vetoing such a measure, would act unilaterally to close the prison, Monaco declined to answer, saying only, “We want to work with Congress.” (Obama has threatened to veto defense authorization bills in the past over Guantanamo, only to relent at the last minute.)

Monaco said the White House hopes to “whittle down” the number of detainees left at Guantanamo to the “irreducible minimum” of those who would then be brought to the U.S. and held “under the laws of war.” That means they would continue to be held under indefinite detention until they could be criminally prosecuted, or newly created review panels determined that they are no longer a threat.

“That’s the only way we’re going to be able to close Guantanamo,” Monaco said. “Ultimately, that’s the way we’re going to do it. But we’ve got to work with Congress, and right now, we’re not even able [to accomplish that] because of legal restrictions.”