The Pentagon has installed a new prison camps commander at Guantánamo and brought home Rear Adm. Thomas Copeman III, the admiral who was supposed to be ``the Closer'' for the controversial U.S. Navy base.

Copeman handed over responsibility Friday to Rear Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson -- the 10th admiral or general to run the offshore detention center.

Copeman's new job is chief of legislative affairs for the Navy in Washington and he will work with Congress and oversee a Navy staff of liaisons to the House and Senate.

During his year at the detention center, Copeman drew up the plan to close Guantánamo, a project that spends $115 million a year. So far, it has cost taxpayers some $2 billion.

He leaves to his successor, Harbeson, responsibility for 10 camps and 181 captives, among them 14 men the courts have ordered set free, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and a Saudi man who allegedly engineered the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors off the coast of Yemen.

Copeman said he saw no special meaning in an assignment that will have him work with a Congress that defied his commander in chief's order to close the camps.

``I don't think it's related whatsoever to that,'' he said. Rather, he said, he interviewed for the job and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus ``selected me.''

In the year he ran the camps, the U.S. downsized the prisoner population by nearly 50 captives. Most were cleared by a presidential task force that saw them resettled in countries not their own, a State Department orchestrated asylum of sorts for men too stigmatized by their Guantánamo stays or identities as devout Muslims to safely go home.

He also finished up his tour with dozens of prisoners living in communal POW-style camps where they can pray, dine, play sports and watch TV in small groups -- a style of living that has cut down considerably on ``tension between the guard and detainees.''

Less interaction between the two sides, he said in a telephone interview, means ``the detainees are happier.''

Copeman arrived in June 2009 from a Pacific Fleet post in Hawaii with the mandate to close the camps, and oversaw a team that wrote the blueprint for closure.

``Some plans have so many external obstacles to them, such as closure that you know you can't look back in disappointment,'' Copeman said.