The perimeter of the Guantanamo Bay naval base is littered with enough razor wire and land mines to deter an invasion. The facilities inside, with a little work, can house and feed thousands of people for months.
But before the United States' military outpost in southern Cuba can become a prison for Taliban and al-Qaida captives, it must be outfitted for a mission that it has rarely been called on to perform in its 98-year history - preventing escape. Keeping people from getting into Guantanamo Bay has always been the challenge in the past.
"It's a very interesting, even fascinating, place down there, and I doubt anyone's had to think real hard before about keeping people inside," says Patrick Moore, a historian at the University of West Florida who led a research trip to Cuba in August and is compiling a history of the naval base.
"You would think that being right on the other side of communism would be very tense, but it's not. It's a warm, tight-knit community with no crime in an absolutely beautiful environment. Water, wildlife, snorkeling - it's a remarkable place."
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that the Pentagon had selected Guantanamo Bay to house prisoners from the war in Afghanistan, calling it the "least worst place we could have selected." Preparations will take "a number of weeks," he said, because of "the kinds of people that we would very likely place there."
The kinds of people are enemies, possibly violent, fanatical ones. And despite Hollywood's insistence that Guantanamo Bay is a violent place (such as when Jack Nicholson, playing the base commander in the 1992 film A Few Good Men, claimed to eat breakfast "300 yards from 4,000 Cubans who are trained to kill me") enemies have been scarce the past decade or more.
The Marines are still in Guantanamo Bay, watching the fence-line between the base and communist Cuba. But the diplomats get much of the action these days, processing refugees and asylum seekers.
The base's mission today is one more of symbol than sentry, Moore says. Camps used recently only for refugees will need to be reinforced for prisoners.
"It makes sense as a place to put prisoners - it's secure, it's remote and it's outside the jurisdiction of the United States court system," says Moore. "But it's not the kind of place that I think everyone thinks it is. It's not a battlefield."
