Plan to close Guantánamo would keep 30 to 60 detainees in custody

President Barack Obama on Tuesday sent Congress his proposal for shuttering the U.S. military prison for alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and aides expressed confidence that Republican lawmakers will be willing to negotiate with the administration.

The plan, which was required to be submitted by Tuesday by previous congressional legislation, would transfer 30 to 60 detainees currently at Guantanamo to an unidentified high-security prison in the United States at an estimated cost of $290 to $475 million.

Senior administration officials who spoke with reporters on background said that cost, which would be to move the detainees and to build a new prison or fortify an existing one, would be recouped within five years because the cost of holding them would be up to $85 million less annually than the $445 million the government spent last year at Guantánamo.

“The reason the president is doing this is Guantánamo is a negative symbol for our national security,” one official said. “It hurts us with our allies and inspires jihadists. It’s time to bring this chapter of American history to a close.”

Virtually all Republican members of Congress, along with the party’s current presidential candidates, have opposed moving the Guantanamo detainees to the United States.

Among 91 detainees currently at the prison on a U.S. base in Cuba, 35 are eligible for transfer, 10 are involved in various phases of military commission hearings and 46 are undergoing review to determine whether they can be transferred, the officials said Tuesday.

The first alleged terrorists were brought to the Guantanamo detention center in January 2002, less than a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington that killed almost 3,000 people.

A total of 779 detainees have been held at Guantanamo for varying amounts of time. President George W. Bush released 532 to other countries, while Obama has sent 151 abroad.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and four of his accused plotters have been engaged in pre-trial hearings for a decade before a military commission judge at Guantanamo, with their actual trial still years from starting because of hundreds of motions filed by their attorneys.

Two of them were at the war court Tuesday for pretrial hearings on defense attorneys’ access to evidence from the CIA “black” sites where they were held for three to four years.

This story was originally published February 23, 2016 at 10:51 AM with the headline "Plan to close Guantánamo would keep 30 to 60 detainees in custody."