The House of Representatives this morning took a hard line against efforts by Democrats and libertarian Republicans to limit the president’s power to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects captured in the U.S.

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have barred military detention of terrorism suspects arrested in the U.S. regardless of their nationality. Smith outlined the argument for his amendment last night:

What we’ve learned in the last 10 years is one power [the president] does not need the power to indefinitely detain or place in military custody people in the United States. Our justice system works.

But House Republicans hit back hard at the bipartisan amendment, attacking it as providing additional rights to foreign terrorists. This morning, the House defeated the Smith-Amash amendment in favor of a competing amendment sponsored by Reps. Jeff Landry (R-LA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). Their amendment, which passed this morning, prohibits the government from denying U.S. citizens their constitutional rights.

Amash slammed the all-Republican sponsored amendment as doing nothing but providing political cover for House Republicans who disingenuously claim to care about civil liberties, telling his House colleagues last night:

The first part of the amendment does nothing. In other words, if you have constitutional rights, then you have constitutional rights.

While the battle in Congress over the detention provisions in the NDAA may have come to an end with the defeat of the Smith-Nash amendment and the passage of the competing Republican amendment, legal and political challenges may await the NDAA in the very near future.

On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York issued a temporary injunction, finding that the detainee provisions in the current NDAA are unconstitutional.

And the White House, in a statement [PDF] released on Tuesday evening, listed a series of objections with the pending NDAA including: restrictions on the implementation of the New START treaty; limits on reductions for the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal; and new restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo detainees. Moreover, the White House objected to the overall size of the bill, which surpasses President Obama’s request by $3.7 billion and exceeds the Budget Control Act spending caps by $8 billion, and threatened to veto the NDAA if sent to the President in its current form.

In 2009, the Obama administration announced that it would try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) and 4 other co-conspirators in civilian courts in New York City, but the right wing and obstructionists in Congress launched a fearmongering campaign to prevent this from happening. “There is not going to be a trial in New York, I guarantee it,” then House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) said at the time. “There is no appetite for the trials in Congress.” Attorney General Eric Holder eventually acquiesced to the pressure and sent the case back to the Pentagon. A military commission trial is set for Guantanamo Bay next month.

But a high-profile terrorism trial is currently taking place in Brooklyn without much fanfare. Authorities arrested three men in 2009 and 2010 accused of plotting to blow up targets on the New York City subway system. While two of the suspects have already pleaded guilty, the trial of the third, Adis Medunjanin, who was arrested in January 2010, began last week. This time though, the right-wing isn’t saying much, NPR reports:

“It’s rather ironic that this case has attracted so little attention,” says Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia University who used to work on detainee affairs for the Bush administration. “This trial has been an occasion for a convention of terrorism suspects.” [...]

What makes the Brooklyn trial of Medunjanin particularly unusual, Waxman of Columbia University says, is the sheer number of convicted terrorists who have shown up in court. He says the testimony, and the way the trial is unfolding, is proof that the criminal justice system can handle terrorism cases — and tough cases with classified material don’t need to be sent to military commissions at Guantanamo.

“In the past, the idea of prosecuting terrorists here in New York has generated huge outcry,” he says. “But this high-profile trial is going on right here.”

Listen to the full NPR report here:

Indeed, the New York Times reported last week that federal officials said the plot was “one of the most serious threats to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks.”

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The 10-year anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, offers few opportunities for celebration. The prison has been described as “arguably the most expensive prison on earth” and human rights activists have voiced concerns about detainees’ lack of access to the U.S. court system and a steady stream of reports of abuse and torture. The 10-year history of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp can best be evaluated through the human and economic costs imposed on both the U.S. taxpayers and detainees. Here are some relevant numbers:

10 years since the first 20 detainees arrived at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray

1 year, 11 months, 21 days since President Barack Obama’s deadline to close Gitmo

779 detainees incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay since 2002

600 detainees have been released

242 detainees at Gitmo when Obama took office

171 detainees still held at Guantánamo Bay

89 detainees still held after being cleared for release

92 percent of prisoners were never al Qaeda fighters according to the U.S. government

86 percent of detainees were turned over after payment of a bounty

13 years old, the age of the youngest detainee

89 years old, the age of the oldest detainee

8 detainee deaths since 2002

6 detainee deaths by suicide

3 alleged detainee homicides from “dry boarding”

$139 million per year to keep the Guantánamo Bay prison open

$800,000 per year to house each detainee

6 detainees convicted by military commissions

6 detainees currently charged by military commission prosecutor

0 detainees released in the past year

ThinkProgress intern Fatima Najiy contributed to this post.

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 Iranian government last week released Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, two Americans who had been held there on false spying allegations since 2009, from prison, and in their first chance to speak to the media, Bauer and Fattal detailed the human rights violations they had experienced at the hands of the Iranian government. Among those violations were poor prison conditions and long periods of time spent in isolation, complaints similar to those filed by the lawyers of prisoners at American prisons controlled by the military and Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Bauer and Fattal, Iranian prison guards repeatedly used the harsh conditions of Guantanamo Bay and CIA prisons around the world to justify their own human rights violations:

BAUER: In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would immediately remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay. They would remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world, and the conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S. We do not believe that such human rights violations on the part of our government justify what has been done to us. Not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments, including the government of Iran, to act in kind.

Watch it:

During his unsuccessful 2009 effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, President Obama and members of his administration claimed that techniques used by the American military there would be used to justify actions against captured American troops. Obama said the prison’s closure would allow the U.S. to regain the “moral high ground” in combating terrorism, while Admiral Dennis Blair called the prison a “a rallying cry for terrorist recruitment.” CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, then the top commander in the Middle East, was more direct. “Gitmo has caused us problems, there’s no question about it,” Petraeus said. “I oversee a region in which the existence of Gitmo has indeed been used by the enemy against us.”

With clear evidence that Obama and his military leaders were correct in asserting that American actions at Guantanamo would be used against Americans captured abroad, perhaps it is time to consider the ramifications of not closing Guantanamo Bay.

The Wikileaks whistleblower group recently released a massive data dump of embassy cables from the U.S. Embassy in Manama, Bahrain.

One of the cables, dated October 23, 2005, details how the U.S. Embassy managed its response to several stories that popped up in the Bahraini press of Bahraini citizens being abused or tortured in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The cable, titled “ARTICLES ALLEGE SEXUAL HUMILIATION, HUNGER STRIKE, OF BAHRAINI GTMO DETAINEES,” cited itself as a “an action request” being made to U.S. government officials.

First, the cable cites the press reports of a detainee, Juma Al Dossary, who claimed to have been sexually abused by interrogators in the prison camp:

According to the October 20 article, Al Dossary claimed that in September 2002 he was chained to the floor in an interrogation room and had his clothing removed by four military police officers. A female interrogator allegedly stripped naked while standing over the detainee and “smeared her menstrual blood over various parts of his body.” In another incident in mid-2003, Al Dossary claimed he was taken into an interrogation room from which he could see a naked man and woman having sex on a table in an adjoining room. When finished, the man and woman entered the interrogation room and asked Al Dossary to reveal the identities of Arab men in photographs, promising him he could have sex with the woman if he cooperated.

The cable then went on to make an “action request” for “talking points” to relay to the Bahraini public and Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

Action request: Embassy has talking points on the hunger strikes, but requests talking points to respond publicly to questions about the treatment of Al Dossary, as well as any points that could be conveyed privately to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in response to the diplomatic note.

In November 2005, shortly after this action request was made, the embassy put out a statement denying that Al Dossary was abused, saying it found “no evidence that substantiates” his claims. In 2007, Dossary was released from Guantanamo Bay with no charges filed against him to resettle in Saudi Arabia (he was featured in a 2006 episode of This American Life than went on to win a Peabody Award). He soon married and received assistance, including a job, car, and cash payments, from the Saudi government.

He later went on to write an op-ed in the Washington Post describing the abuse he alleges occurred while he was at the prison camp. He recalled the film United 93 and a soldier who had been merciful to him while he was at Guantanamo, “I was watching ‘United 93,’ I thought of the soldier who had offered me compassion in Guantanamo. Her words reminded me that we all share common values, and only by holding on to them can we ensure that there is mercy and brotherhood in the world. After more than five years in Guantanamo, I can think of nothing more important.”

Unfortunately, it seems that the U.S. government’s first response was to deny that Dossary was mistreated at all rather than properly investigate the alleged abuses. These cables document how the embassy in Manama coordinated these efforts.