Guantanamo Naval Base

A federal appeals court Tuesday refused to block military commission proceedings against a Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay. Lawyers for Omar Khadr had asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to halt the case, in which Khadr is charged with murder for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a Special Forces soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan. Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, also faces conspiracy and other charges.

The U.S. Army has dropped all charges against a colonel who served as an intelligence officer at the Guantanamo Bay naval base prison and had been accused of trying to take classified material from the base, officials said Thursday. Army Reserve Col. Jackie Duane Farr was the highest-ranking of three U.S. service members charged in 2003 in connection with suspected security breaches at the base in Cuba, where the United States is holding about 585 foreign terrorism suspects.

The Pentagon has concluded that the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay meets the standards for humane treatment of detainees established in the Geneva Convention accords.

The Clinton Administration, racing to deflect the continuing torrent of Cuban refugees, said Wednesday that it is expanding its detention facilities at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba to hold as many as 60,000 people--three times the camps' present capacity. The move, unveiled at the White House by Defense Secretary William J. Perry, will force the Pentagon to bring home some 1,700 dependents of U.S. naval personnel now living at the base to avoid overtaxing the water and sewage systems.

The Pentagon is scheduled to assign defense lawyers to two more terrorism suspects held at a U.S. base in Cuba and may modify rules allowing the monitoring of conversations between defense attorneys and defendants tried before military tribunals, officials said Thursday. The Defense Department also released about nine minutes of video showing some of the roughly 650 men imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay naval base, showing what one official called the "humane conditions" in which they were held.

The Pentagon has no plans to fire the head of the prison at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba and will not subject Arab and Muslim service members to special scrutiny despite the arrests of three Muslim workers at the prison, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. Responding to a reporter's question on whether he would consider replacing Army Maj. Gen.

President Clinton pledged Tuesday to lead a team of international donors in providing $4 billion to $8 billion to revive the devastated economy of Cuba once it is rid of dictator Fidel Castro and on the road to democracy. In a report for Congress endorsed by Clinton, the White House said the United States would even be willing to give up its Guantanamo naval base on Cuban soil to show that it wants normal relations with a new Cuba.

What does the Supreme Court decision recognizing Guantanamo detainees' habeas corpus rights mean for the detainees? About 270 men are at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southern Cuba -- 19 already charged with war crimes and 250 or so being held without charges, many for more than six years. Habeas corpus is a constitutionally guaranteed right to challenge detention, but the Pentagon has denied it to the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.

Declaring that foreigners captured during the U.S. war on terrorism have rights, attorneys for detainees held without charges at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba pleaded for help Monday from a skeptical federal appeals court. Sixteen people from Australia, Britain and Kuwait, some held more than a year, are seeking "the most modest of rights ... we want access to an impartial tribunal," attorney Thomas Wilner said.

More than 250 Haitian refugees being held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba, most of whom have tested HIV-positive, entered the fifth day of a hunger strike Tuesday in an effort to persuade the Clinton Administration to permit them into the United States. The refugees, many who have been in detention at Guantanamo for more than a year, are caught in a legal Catch-22. Found to have plausible political asylum claims, they cannot be returned to Haiti. But current U.S.