Guantanamo Naval Base

In late 2001, when the Pentagon decided to put detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the task of setting up a camp and establishing its rules went to Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert. Lehnert planned to rely on what he learned while running a camp at Guantanamo in the mid-1990s for nearly 19,000 Cubans and Haitians trying to flee to the United States. And he was determined to follow the spirit, if not the letter, of the Geneva Convention, providing decent food, banning extreme interrogation and allowing religious services.

Key Democratic lawmakers agreed Wednesday to allow detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be transferred to the United States for trial, removing one of several hurdles the administration must clear to meet its January deadline for closing the military prison. Left unresolved was whether the administration could also hold detainees indefinitely in this country without charging them. House and Senate Democrats who are negotiating the defense authorization bill included language that would prohibit only the "release" of detainees in the United States.

An American document that allegedly describes the torture of a former Guantanamo Bay inmate should be made public, a British court ruled Friday, dismissing Britain's argument that it was suppressing the information to preserve its intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States and to uphold national safety. The document contains a seven-paragraph summary of the treatment that Binyam Mohamed received in 2002 after being detained as a suspected terrorist. Mohamed, 31, a British resident, alleges that he was subjected to torture, including beatings and sexual mutilation, by interrogators in Pakistan and elsewhere with the full knowledge of American and British intelligence agents.

In addition to housing foreign detainees, an Illinois state prison could become a site for military trials of those charged with acts of terrorism, an administration official acknowleged Monday. As the Obama administration works to identify a detention facility for prisoners transferred from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, federal officials also are considering sites to hold military commission trials for at least some of the suspects.

The drink selection is limited, but the view is hard to match. Where else but on the red vinyl bar stools atop Mt. Malones could tourists sip rum in Cuba while peering through Soviet-made binoculars at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay? Here, visitors--mainly Europeans--watch helicopters take off to patrol the base perimeter, or look at residential zones through a viewer made by Sea Coast Manufacturing of Fair Hope, Ala., imported somehow despite a decades-long U.S. trade embargo.

Waving plastic American flags, the last Cubans held in refugee camps boarded a plane for Florida and freedom Wednesday, finishing a journey many had begun on rafts more than a year ago. Some cried and others waved or thrust their arms in victory as they quietly boarded the jet, leaving behind the canvas and wood camps that once held 50,000 Cubans and Haitians desperate to flee to the United States. The last Haitians left Nov.

The Guantanamo Bay Naval Base tent cities set up to shelter Haitians and Cubans will close at the end of this month.

Rising temperatures and fading hopes could touch off rioting this summer among some 20,000 Cuban rafters--most of them single men--being held in barren detention camps at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military chief of the U.S. Atlantic command warned Tuesday. "We could have riots by July," four-star Gen. John J. Sheehan, commander of U.S. forces in the Caribbean, said at a press conference here. "They need a sense of hope. My fear is that . . .

Stephen Abraham, a Newport Beach lawyer and lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, hardly seemed like whistle-blower material. A decorated intelligence officer, he served after 9/11 as lead counter-terrorism analyst at the Joint Intelligence Center at Pearl Harbor. He was a longtime Republican, a patriot devoted to protecting national security.

A federal appeals court refused Friday to reconsider a ruling broadening its own authority to scrutinize evidence against detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The decision is a setback for the Bush administration, which was displeased by the court's three-judge ruling in July and had urged all 10 judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review it. The administration said the decision jeopardized national security.