Navy families, immigration detention employees and lawyers have been streaming back to the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to restart functions that were halted by the one-two punch of the government shutdown and Hurricane Melissa.
About 1,000 people had returned by Saturday night to a slightly transformed scene. During the hurricane, driving rains soaked the base’s usually dusty brown fields, turning them green, and workers recently set up a huge Christmas tree and other holiday decorations near the base’s commercial district.
A partially rebuilt pier was freshly painted, beaches were restored and piles of tree limbs, roof remnants and other debris awaited pickup around the 45-square-mile military installation.
Schoolchildren and their teachers were returning to their classrooms on Monday for the first time in three weeks. They had been evacuated to a naval air station in the Florida panhandle for the storm, and then stayed on while Guantánamo’s remaining 3,000 residents cleaned up.
The Navy has yet to tally the cost of the hurricane damage, but it said that four families who had been evacuated required new housing.
Color-coded inspection notices on base buildings now warn which structures are unsafe or require repairs, and flags across the installation were at half-staff for former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died two weeks ago.
Those returning to the base included an Army judge, who will preside over the first hearings in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case since May.
During the weekslong slowdown, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delegated the responsibility to negotiate plea agreements in the case to the deputy defense secretary, Steve Feinberg, who has been on the job since March.
A former C.I.A. prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is accused of helping to orchestrate the attack, in which suicide bombers blew a hole in the warship off Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, killing 17 American sailors. If convicted, he could face the death penalty. The judge has scheduled the trial to start on June 1.
Mr. Nashiri’s case has been in pretrial hearings since 2011. New hearings were scheduled for Monday, after court technicians restarted secured communications systems that were shut down in advance of the hurricane.
Defense lawyers also returned to the base over the weekend for the first time since the government shutdown to meet with some of the 15 wartime prisoners. Legal travel and confidential communications were declared nonessential during the shutdown, another impediment to trial preparation.
Other returnees included about four dozen Homeland Security employees, including Immigration, Customs and Enforcement officers, who were evacuated before the hurricane as nonessential workers.
No detainees designated for deportation have been held at the base since Oct. 1, and none are expected until after Thanksgiving.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
The post Hurricane Melissa Evacuees Return to Guantánamo Base appeared first on New York Times.
