US: Three years ago this week the first 20 Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects captured by US forces in Afghanistan arrived at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Today the base is the centre of controversy, with human rights groups and lawyers alleging cruel and inhuman treatment of the 550 detainees.
A US army general is investigating accounts of alleged brutal treatment of detainees witnessed by FBI agents last summer.
Detainees from 42 countries are housed in prefabricated 2x3 metre cells behind fences topped with coils of razor wire. They are held incommunicado in a state of effective internment without trial. A Pentagon spokesman acknowledged on Monday that most have no more information to give US interrogators and only 50 are kept in separate cells for "high-value" prisoners.
The detainees are guarded by hundreds of reservists on six-month tours of duty, pending the construction of a permanent 300-cell building.
Their conditions are much more punitive than those applied at Long Kesh in the early 1970s to Republicans and Loyalists detainees. The Guantanamo prisoners are held incommunicado, no family visits are allowed, and they have no access to lawyers.
In June the US Supreme Court ruled over government objections that their cases could be heard by US courts and that they must be given a chance to appeal their status to a non-government tribunal. As a result, the Pentagon set up Combatant Status Review Tribunals. Detainees could not challenge witnesses, summon their own defence witnesses, or see the evidence against them.
Up to the end of November, the tribunals had reviewed just over 400 cases and two detainees were released. (Since the camp opened in 2002, some 150 prisoners have been released without legal proceedings). The process was then stalled when US District Judge James Robertson ruled in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan (34), a driver for Osama bin Laden charged with transporting weapons for al-Qaeda, that a detainee could not be tried there unless a proper court decided he was not entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.
The judge also ruled that the tribunals must conform to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, which says inter alia that suspects should be allowed to question witnesses and to be tried in a timely fashion.
The colonels brought to Guantanamo to preside over the high-profile war crimes trial were sent home. Now some 69 prisoners have challenged their detention as enemy combatants.
Apart from the Red Cross, human rights organisations have been refused permission to inspect conditions at Guantanamo. The FBI witnesses reported incidents where a prisoner was shackled and forced to lie in his own faeces; another was draped in an Israeli flag and and subjected to loud music and strobe lights; and others were chained to the floor in bare cells and threatened with dogs.
The Red Cross reportedly told the US government that the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo involves psychological and physical coercion "tantamount to torture".
In a statement marking the centre's third anniversary, Amnesty International said: "Guantanamo has become an icon of lawlessness ... dangerous to us all."
While yesterday's announcement of the release of four men was welcomed, "hundreds more remain, with no legal recourse or access", said Ms Barbara Olshansky, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The use of tough interrogation techniques at Guantanamo was approved by Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld.