As lawmakers on Congress’ deficit reduction super committee look for places to cut the federal budget ahead of their upcoming deadline, they may want to look at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The facility is “arguably the most expensive prison on earth,” according to a new report from the Miami Herald. With a budget of $139 million last year to house just 171 detainees, it costs more than $800,000 to keep each prisoner for a year — more than 30 times the average cost of a traditional prison. The report is based on a “secret study” conducted by the camp’s former deputy commander, a money manager by training, who calls the facility “expensive” and “inefficient”:

“It’s a slow-motion Berlin Airlift — that’s been going on for 10 years,” says retired Army Brig. Gen. Greg Zanetti, a West Point graduate who in 2008 was deputy commander at the detention center.

Both its location and temporary nature drive up costs, says Zanetti. While there, he wrote a secret study that compared the operation to Alcatraz, noting that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had closed it in 1963 because it was too expensive.

At Guantánamo, everything comes in by barge or aircraft “from paper clips to bulldozers,” Zanetti says, as well as the revolving guard force. Also, more recently, a massage chair for stressed-out prison camp staff.

The camp enjoys fairly lavish facilities and services for both guards and prisoners alike, and employs 1,850 troops, linguists, intelligence analysts, federal agents, and contract laborers, many of whom receive combat pay, as if they were stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Unlike troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, however, commanders can also bring their families and kids, at extra expense to taxpayers. The Pentagon notes that extra costs are unavoidable dealing with a remote facility in a foreign country.

Thus, the Obama administration had made attempts to rein in costs of detaining prisoners by urging the closure of the facility. Zanetti’s report said that Attorney General Eric Holder and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta wrote a letter to GOP congressional leaders noting that while Guantánamo spends “more than $800,000 per detainee,” “our federal prisons spend a little over $25,000 per year, per prisoner, and federal courts and prosecutors routinely handle numerous terrorist case a year well within their operating budgets.” Nonetheless, Republicans — who claim to be concerned about the deficit about all else — have refused to even seriously consider shuttering the camp. A current GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, even once said he wanted to “double Guantanamo.”

The Republican candidates for president haven’t talked about foreign policy too much. Given that economic issues have been dominating the campaign narrative, it’s perhaps understandable that national security is largely absent from the debate. But also, the Republicans don’t really have much to criticize. Indeed, foreign policy has received scant attention during the televised GOP presidential debates. But that’s about to change. This Saturday, Nov. 12, CBS News and the National Journal will host the first debate focused solely on foreign policy at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. (CNN, Heritage and AEI will host another one on Nov. 22).

So what are the candidates likely to say? When they do talk national security, it’s usually trite and unfounded attacks on President Obama like he has made America weak, thrown Israel “under the bus” or goes around the world apologizing for America. Mitt Romney will probably tell voters that Obama thinks “there is nothing unique about the United States.” Rick Perry will most likely sound off about how “the world has never been as dangerous” because of Obama. Look for Newt Gingrich to oppose whatever the president supports, even if that means the former speaker betrays a position he held as little as 13 seconds prior. And as for Herman Cain, he’s still trying to figure out whether China has nuclear weapons, let alone tackle the president’s foreign policy positions.

Seeing that these GOP candidates aren’t likely to accurately represent the president’s foreign policy during these debates, ThinkProgress has released a new report — “Obama’s Foreign Policy Successes” — detailing key foreign policy victories during the Obama administration, from killing Osama bin Laden and ushering Middle East democracy to ending the war in Iraq and reducing nuclear weapons stockpiles. Read the full report here.

The release this week of a U.N. report with detailed findings pointing toward potential Iranian nuclear weapons work saw a chorus of right-wing calls for war with Iran. Yesterday, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney came out with a Wall Street Journal op-ed threatening war with the Islamic Republic, delivering the message to the Iranians that “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In the wake of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s report on Iran — which, despite the hype, may not be quite the “game-changer” hawks had hoped for — one prominent Romney adviser went further than the candidate, calling for a military strike against Iran. Eric Edelman, a former staffer to Vice President Dick Cheney and board member of a neoconservative pressure group, warned in the journal Foreign Policy that, if Iran goes nuclear, there would be a series of terrible consequence. After raising the “possibility of an Israeli-Iranian nuclear conflict” — ie, nuclear war — in an article headlined “Why Obama Should Take Out Iran’s Nuclear Program: The Case For Striking Before It’s Too Late,” Edelman and his co-authors wrote:

The closer Iran gets to acquiring nuclear weapons, the fewer options will be available to stop its progress. At the same time, Iran’s incentives to back down will only decrease as it approaches the nuclear threshold. Given these trends, the United States faces the difficult decision of using military force soon to prevent Iran from going nuclear, or living with a nuclear Iran and the regional fallout.

Edelman’s hawkishness on Iran is not new: In a January article in the same journal, he wrote with the same co-authors: “The military option should not be dismissed because of the appealing but flawed notion that containment is a relatively easy or low-risk solution to a very difficult problem.”

As ThinkProgress has noted, hawks abound on the Romney campaign foreign policy team — among them, those who pushed for the Iraq war and a slew who’ve pressed the case for attacking Iran. One even advocates for a controversial Iranian exile group that the State Department considers a terrorist organization. (HT: Marc Lynch)