Bulwark Takes - Trump's Guantanamo Bay Threats Could Actually Happen (w/ Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling)

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling joins Ben Parker to discuss how Trump’s extreme plan to send migrants to Guantanamo Bay would be both immensely expensive and enormously inhumane.

There's been a plan floated from the administration to send as many as 30,000, possibly more, deportees to the American military base at Guantanamo Bay. Famously, we held a lot of high-value detainees from the War on Terror at Guantanamo Bay. It's been an American naval base since the Spanish-American War. But you have, in your experience, and I'd like you to tell us a little bit about this, you've overseen bases. and you've overseen bases with a lot of people, including in some really remote parts of the world. Is it possible, or what would you need to make it possible to ship 30,000 people away from their homes to a spot in the middle of the Caribbean, surrounded by an

unfriendly country in a way that is even remotely humanitarian? Well, first of all, it's not impossible. I think when you're when you task the U.S. government and specifically the U.S. military to build a base, they can do that. Now, I think we ought to kind of, first of all, talk about what's at Guantanamo right now. It is, as you said, a naval base. It also has an airfield that the U.S. military uses. But right now, it's about 45 square miles in terms of a piece of ground, but it has about 6,000 people assigned there, mostly Marines and civilians. It's separated into the housing area for those people, the naval and air base for those people, plus what most Americans know is the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the so-called Gitmo that everybody heard about during the war on terror. Well, that's not a big detention facility. At its max capacity, it can hold max about 70,

or excuse me, 700 people. Right now, it has somewhere between 30 and 40 high-value terrorists still remaining there that have not been repatriated to various countries because they're still undergoing legal action. But you're talking about jumping from a small detention facility of 700 up to something that would potentially hold 30,000. And when you talk about that number of detainees, well, I'll cite an example for you. Leavenworth, which is the most famous of all military prisons in the middle of Kansas, has about 1,400 prisoners there. Now, those are murderers and rapists and some minor crimes that the military has basically confined military members. In that 1,400 or 1,500 prison, there was about 500, between 400 and 500 staff.

So you're talking about one staff for every three prisoners. And that's just the guards in a facility that's already built. And anyone who's ever been out to Leavenworth who has seen the detention facility knows that it's very old. It's an old brick infrastructure, and it's been there for decades.

So when you're talking about building a new facility, which I have actually had to do in 2004 in Iraq. We've built barracks and Camp Liberty, this is somewhat famous, for a large number of American soldiers. It took us about six or seven months to complete that. We used what were called CHUs, containerized housing units. They're like small mobile homes to put there. And that wouldn't be a good thing to put on an island like Cuba because of the hurricanes that normally go through here. You have to consider those kind of things.

But whenever you're building large bases for 30,000 people, it's not just the housing. It's the sewer systems, the latrines, the cafeterias, how you feed people, the guards, the number of guards that would have to be housed there. You have to determine whether or not they're going to have families to accompany the guard force. The transport in and out in this little airfield that's at Guantanamo Bay, the kinds of things, the amount of food that would have to be brought in for the cafeterias, the kinds of trial facilities you might have to make to release them.

You know, when you add all those things together, Ben, in terms of building a base for that number of people, I mean, 30,000 flies off the lips relatively easily, but when you're talking about housing 30,000 prisoners, you're probably going to have to have between, I mean, this is just a guess, between 6,000 and 10,000 support personnel, not just guards, but engineers that unclog the toilets or engineers that fix things that break, you know, the folks that run the PXs and the commissaries for those who are

there and need food. If you bring families in, then you have to have family housing. So this is a much more ambitious plan than just saying, hey, we're going to send 30,000 down there. And truthfully, I don't know what those 30,000 would consist of. Are these hardcore criminals? Or are these just immigrants? Because there has already been confusion

on that with the administration on who they're going after. One more thing I'd point out from experience. When I was a young captain, I was part of an infantry unit in Louisiana at Fort Polk. And in the 1980s, one of the missions we got, we received, was to immediately go to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, deploy our battalion of about a thousand soldiers to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where they were housing about 25,000 immigrants from Cuba and Haiti as part of the Muriel boat lift. No one remembers that. But we were there for about nine months. The prisoners rioted, not prisoners because they weren't. They

weren't criminals. These were just immigrants we didn't know what to do with from the Muriel boatlift. They started forming gangs. They were making shivs inside of the prison. They finally rioted, broke loose, attacked some of the local towns. If you want to look at the history of the Muriel boatlift and what happened in Fort Chaffee and Fort Smith, Arkansas, almost derailed the political ambitions of the governor of Arkansas at the time, a guy named Bill Clinton, who I think most of us remember. So it was a whole lot harder to do than it was in terms of the planning that goes on in Washington. Yeah, I mean, I usually think about large numbers of people like this in terms of

like NFL stadiums. And we're talking about give or take roughly a half an NFL stadium worth of people who have just been ripped from their homes, sent to the middle of the Caribbean, surrounded by an unfriendly state and basically told, congratulations, you're camping. And I mean, how are they going to get fresh water? How are they going to get medical care? It's just going to be, I mean, you, you give a great description of sort of what it would take to make that sort of operation at all humane. And the answer is it would take a lot of hard work, thousands and thousands of people, millions, if not billions of dollars in a long time. Which means either that they're not going to do it or they're not going to do it in

a humane way. You know, Ben, this reminds me of the other podcast we did together, and that was the one on shock and awe. And what's interesting is the shock and awe is saying we're going to send 30,000 people to this relatively small island. What isn't accounted for is the planning that goes along with that initial announcement. And when you're talking, like you just said, I didn't even mention medical facilities, treatment centers, the kinds of things that you need in a prison because you're dealing with human beings, even that's not considered. What's the requirement for doctors for beds in a clinic? I don't know because I haven't done the stubby pencil drill on it,

but it doesn't appear like anyone else is doing that either. Yeah, that's right. It's the old saw, right? Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. And you don't get the sense of this administration. They have a lot of professionals thinking about logistics. General Hertling, thank you so much for joining us again. Hey, if you enjoyed this, go check out General Hertling's piece of the bulwark. It's called Using Military Jets for Deportations is an Ugly, Wasteful Spectacle. While you're there, become a Bulwark Plus member. Subscribe to this channel as well. And General Hertling, we'll have you back soon. Thanks again. Hey, thanks, Ben. Appreciate it.