Ohiocore

Kellogg Brown & Root, the routinely corrupt subsidiary of Halliburton, has added another $30 Million in Guantanamo construction contracts, to build the 220-cell "Camp Six" by next June. Why this would be necessary after reducing the number of "enemy combatant detainees" by half makes for interesting speculation. NYTimes includes a rehash of Pentagon spokespersonspeak, that it "is designed to be safer for the long-term detention of detainees and the guards... It is also expected to require less manpower to operate." So is it just detain more with less? Let's check numbers. From Miami Herald:

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this week that prison camp construction has already cost about $100 million, and the Pentagon spends $90 million to $95 million a year to run it.

So how much cheaper will the new facility be to run? It won't even contain half of the existing detainee stock, so the old facility will have to remain operational in some form. For the prison site, this contract constitutes a capital outlay equal to one-third of the total operating cost. So if this were a regular cost/benefit evaluation, we should conclude that Rumsfeld intends to hold the detainees there for at least as many years after the completion of Camp Six as the fraction of operating cost saved. So if $15 million annually could be saved (1/12th the total operating cost), the fiscal corollary would be that they intend to keep the prisoners for at least 12 years after the completion of the new facility. That would be June 2018.

Of course saving money is rarely the point of a government contract, and certainly not this one. This $30 million is just a piece of the larger $500 million contract Halliburton has with the Navy.

The Herald continues in a more detailed account:

Army Col. David McWilliams, a spokesman for the Southern Command, said the military had submitted the proposal for the more permanent structure long before the current debate. It was unclear why the announcement of its approval came this week...

The Bush administration had initially included $41.8 million for the new prison and high-tech fence in its supplemental appropriations request. that sought $81.9 billion in war-on-terror funding.

It was not immediately clear whether the price of the project had dropped to $30 million or whether other contracts would provide related work at Camp 6.