“Why Obama has failed to close Guantánamo” is a New Yorker article interesting for some of the data presented. (You can probably guess the conclusion regarding the title question: it turns out not to be President Obama’s fault; Donald Trump will be a dictator with unlimited power, but Obama’s hands have been tied by bureaucrats and Congress.)
There are 76 prisoners and it costs taxpayers $445 million per year (can this accounting be correct? how does one separate the cost of the prison from the surrounding naval base?). That’s almost $6 million per prisoner per year.
Generally foreign governments seem to have a keener grasp of the obvious than do we:
In February, 2009, the U.S. Ambassador, Deborah Jones, met with Kuwait’s Minister of the Interior and, according to State Department cables, warned him that Kuwait had to “show its seriousness in changing and controlling the behaviors of extremists within its society.”
The minister responded, “You know better than I that we cannot deal with these people. If I take their passports, they will sue to get them back.” He added, “If they are rotten, they are rotten, and the best thing to do is get rid of them. You picked them up in Afghanistan; you should drop them off in Afghanistan, in the middle of the war zone.”
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