Detention Camps

They were imprisoned without charge and denied adequate food and water for months on end. Some of their eardrums burst when they were forced to puff out their cheeks while being repeatedly slapped on the face. Others were lathered in pork grease and forced to crawl through colonies of biting red ants.

A list released by the U.S. military shows that at least 75 Guantanamo detainees have been cleared for release by a task force that has been sorting through the remaining prisoners as part of an Obama administration effort to close the prison by early next year. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, a spokesman for the prison in Cuba that holds about 223 men, said the list was posted in common areas throughout the detention camps earlier this month to communicate directly with detainees.

Forty-six years later, Jim Kanno still feels the anger. He will try to cover it with achievements in politics, academia and business. He will mask it with a smile. He will temper it with affluence. But the bitterness won't go away. What more can he do, Kanno asks, to convince others that he is a loyal American? During World War II, the Kannos were among 120,000 Japanese-Americans, mostly from the West Coast, who were forced to leave their homes and live in detention camps.

L.A. County public health officials lifted a boil-water order at a county juvenile detention camp Wednesday afternoon, weeks after they detected bacteria in the camp's water supply. Health department officials issued the boil-water order Oct. 3 after tests in late September showed coliform bacteria in tap water at Camp David Gonzalez in Malibu, which houses about 100 teenage boys. None of the youths or two dozen staff at the camp were sickened by the contaminated water, county probation officials said, so they did not notify parents or guardians.

The end of Umusa Selimovic's life on a Bosnian farm came May 16, 1992, when she hid in the woods, clutching her baby granddaughter as she watched the Serbs execute her neighbors. About 5 p.m., five Serbian military vehicles had entered Zaklopace, a village of 500 in eastern Bosnia. Selimovic, a 57-year-old widow, ran with 1 1/2-year-old Sanela and the child's mother, Hurija. Through the trees, they saw soldiers lining up and executing about 40 Muslims--including women and children--who had been on their way to till the fields.

A list released by the U.S. military shows that at least 75 Guantanamo detainees have been cleared for release by a task force that has been sorting through the remaining prisoners as part of an Obama administration effort to close the prison by early next year. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, a spokesman for the prison in Cuba that holds about 223 men, said the list was posted in common areas throughout the detention camps earlier this month to communicate directly with detainees.

Like most axioms, "Penny-wise and pound-foolish" has become a cliche because its truth is proved over and over again. The latest example is Los Angeles County's Chief Probation Officer Barry Nidorf's proposal to close 14 of 15 Los Angeles County juvenile detention camps (Metro, March 21). Penny-wise, closures would save $20 million according to Nidorf. Pound-foolish, he estimates closure of camps in California could cost the California Youth Authority (euphemism for prison for minors)

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, who Wednesday came close to apologizing for British concentration camps during the Boer War, used the occasion to stress her nation's strong links with South Africa. "No one who reads of the distressing conditions in the detention camps which held both white and black detainees could fail to be moved even today, 100 years later," she told a banquet at the end of the first day of her second state visit.

The Southern California office of Legal Assistance for Vietnamese Asylum Seekers (LAVAS) is almost in visible, tucked into a far back corner of a two-story Bolsa Avenue strip mall on the edge of Little Saigon. It is spare and cluttered, decorated only with posters extolling human rights and postcards painted by Vietnamese refugees living in detention camps throughout Asia. It is a hot Sunday, and Lan Quoc Nguyen is getting ready to settle in for a typical day's work. Throughout the day Nguyen, the supervising attorney for the office, and his staff will continue the often frustrating and labyrinthine job of reviewing case after case of Vietnamese refugees being held in the camps who want desperately to find asylum in a country--any country--other than Vietnam.

Compassion, guilt and vivid images of near-swamped boatloads of half-dead Vietnamese on the shores of Southeast Asia drew the Western powers to Geneva in July, 1979. A deal was struck. The Vietnamese "boat people" would be given homes and new lives in the West. By that summer, more than 350,000 had reached rude camps in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. Few conditions were placed on their resettlement. They would be taken in.

baghdad -- Child fighters, once a rare presence on Iraq's battlefields, are playing a significant and growing role in kidnappings, killings and roadside bombings in the country, U.S. military officials say. Boys, some as young as 11, now outnumber foreign fighters at U.S. detention camps in Iraq. Since March, their numbers have risen to 800 from 100, said Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone, the commander of detainee operations. The Times reported last month that only 130 non-Iraqi fighters were in U.S.

Angered by a recent report criticizing the quality of schooling for youths in juvenile halls and camps, Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe is calling for major changes to education in the system, such as creating arts-themed classroom programs in detention facilities.

Inside of a week, a U.S. federal court, retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and two military judges assigned to the war-crimes tribunals here dealt serious blows to the Bush administration's efforts to detain and prosecute terrorism suspects. Some legal scholars and analysts predict more obstacles to trials for any of the 385 foreign prisoners at the U.S. military detention compound.

Authorities asked for the public's help Wednesday in their search for four youths who made a violent escape Sunday from a juvenile detention camp in Orange County's Cleveland National Forest. The boys allegedly fought their way out of the low-security Los Pinos Conservation Camp shortly before midnight. When a Probation Department deputy tried to stop them, one of the boys struck him with a heavy metal pipe, sheriff's spokesman Jim Amormino said.

Sports movies about underdogs battling and clawing from behind to make it to the big game are as familiar as the old gang on Monday -- excuse me, Sunday -- Night Football. And "Gridiron Gang" is as formula-bound as they get, even though it's a movie taken from real life.

The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan ordered a "top to bottom" assessment of American prison camps in the country Wednesday, saying he wanted assurances that facilities were adequate and that detainees were being treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Army Lt. Gen. David Barno ordered the probe to ensure that "internationally accepted standards of handling detainees are being met" and that staffing was adequate to the job.

While Saddam Hussein parades a handful of allied pilots before TV cameras, American forces are constructing huge barbed-wire compounds in Saudi Arabia to house as many as 20,000 prisoners expected to be captured in the first week of the ground war against Iraq. "The tempo of the battle is going to be swift," said Maj. Gary Kosinuk, an Army operations officer who is drawing up plans for the camps. "If you have a large number of prisoners in the way, it slows down combat power."

Haitians being held in a U.S. immigration detention camp near here have refused to eat since Friday to protest what they charge is preferential treatment given to Cuban refugees. "We want our freedom like the Cubans," the Haitians said in a letter released Sunday. The hunger strike was prompted by the lionization on television talk shows and in the press of two Cuban pilots who in recent days brought 51 Cuban defectors to the United States.

The military has charged four U.S. soldiers with abusing prisoners of war in Iraq, a spokesman said Saturday. The soldiers and their families deny the accusations. The four members of the military police from a Pennsylvania-based Army Reserve unit are accused of punching, kicking and breaking bones of prisoners at Camp Bucca near Umm al Qasr in southern Iraq. The soldiers, charged this month, are the first U.S. troops known to face charges of abusing prisoners in the Iraq conflict.

A judge on Friday threw out Orange County's plans to expand a Trabuco Canyon detention center for youthful offenders, dealing the project what county officials said could be a fatal blow. The county must complete the $18-million facility by the end of 2003 or lose an $8.4-million state grant. Officials doubt they can make the deadline. If the judge's ruling stands, "we are going to have to give back the grant money," said Thomas G. Wright, the county's chief deputy probation officer.