Cubasource

December 2: Panamanian authorities said they would investigate whether government officials abused their power while carrying out former President Mireya Moscoso's pardons of four Cubans who had been accused of trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. Special prosecutor Arquimedes Saenz said authorities planned to solicit testimonies from former Interior and Justice Secretary Arnulfo Escalona as well as Carlos Bares, the ex-director of the national police force, as part of the investigation. (AP, 2/12/04)

December 16: Britain's highest court ruled against the detention of foreign terrorism suspects without trial, in a major judgment on how far human rights can be restricted in the "war on terror." The Law Lords were deciding the cases of nine Muslim men whose detention under draconian post-Sept. 11 legislation -- some for three years -- is a cause celebre for rights activists. (Reuters, 18/12/04)

December 17: Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable Al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers. The buildings used by the CIA are shrouded by high fences covered with thick green mesh plastic and ringed with floodlights, officials said. They sit within the larger Camp Echo complex, which was erected to house the Defense Department's high-value detainees and those awaiting military trials on terrorism charges. (The Boston Globe, 17/12/04)

December 17: “The Bogota Three” -- IRA suspects James Monaghan, 58, Niall Connolly, 38, and Martin McCauley, 41 -- are hiding out in communist Cuba under the protection of Fidel Castro. Republican sources said that the three had fled to the Caribbean island after their release in June. Cuba has a long-standing extradition treaty with Colombia but it's unlikely the communist state will co-operate with the right-wing junta and force the men to leave. Colombian officials admitted they have no idea where the Irishmen are. (The Mirror, 18/12/04)

December 26: At least ten current and former detainees at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have alleged that they were abused in custody. The American Civil LIberties Union has released more FBI reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act on FBI agents' accounts of abuse of prisoners taken from Afghanistan and Iraq. "On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more," an unidentified FBI agent has written. Brent Mickum, a Washington attorney for one of the detainees, said: "Now there is no question these guys have been tortured. Every allegation that I have heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers." A Pentagon spokesman said that the military had an ongoing probe of torture claims and was taking credible allegations seriously. (World News, 26/12/04)