GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The commander of the controversial Guantanamo Bay detention center has backed President Barack Obama’s public stance of closing the prison down.

Obama called the base “not in the best interests of the American people” in an April speech that came as scores of prisoners were on a hunger strike to protest their ongoing captivity, in many cases for more than a decade without charge.

The president said he would act to have the base closed, adding, "It is contrary to our interests and needs to stop."

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Navy Rear Adm. Richard Butler, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, said he agreed with Obama’s pledge to shut down the detention facility, which in a month will mark 12 years since the first prisoners arrived, and has so far cost taxpayers $5 billion.

“As a naval officer, I fully support whatever it is my commander in chief is going to tell me to do,” Butler said. “So I’m going to fully support that effort.”

But with only three prisoners transferred out of Guantanamo recently and just one appearing before the new parole-board-type hearings in the six months since Butler settled into his job, shuttering the facility is far off.

“In the meantime, we’re going to keep running the camps to the best of our ability,” he said.

Butler, who previously served as deputy director of the Navy's Air Warfare Requirements division, arrived at Guantanamo during the height of the mass hunger strike at the prison and amid a controversy over the force-feeding of detainees that human rights groups said rose to the level of torture.

He said confronting those issues was challenging and complex. However, the well-being of the guard force came first.

“My No. 1 priority is their welfare,” Butler said. “That, quite frankly, is my biggest challenge. The second one is the welfare of the detainees and just making sure everything we do is consistent with their health and welfare.”

He would not discuss claims made in a recent report aired by “60 Minutes” and since retracted, in which Col. John Bogdan, the prison warden, said twice as many guards suffered post-traumatic stress disorder at Guantanamo compared with soldiers deployed to combat zones.