The cost to house a captive at Guantánamo Bay is $800,000 per year, far in excess of other federal or state lockups.

A recently released, and brutally honest, look at the run-up to the disastrous Bay of Pigs Operation focuses on the CIA’s prominent role.

Until now, there has been no comprehensive list of who is still held at the Guantánamo detention center in Cuba. McClatchy determined who was still there using both sources and court records as well as secret intelligence files obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to McClatchy.

The Obama administration turned to a Republican senator from Florida to deliver a message to the Spanish government: Don't indict former President George W. Bush's legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees or it will chill U.S.-Spanish relations. The Spanish responded with a lecture on the independence of the judiciary.

Guantánamo is a place the Pentagon likes to call the most transparent detention center on Earth. Hundreds of reporters have visited there, they say, since the first al Qaeda suspects arrived eight years ago. They skip the part about how few go back more than once — stymied by the sheer frustration at the rules, the hoops, the time, and the costs of doing basic journalism.

Foreign war-on-terror captives rose for pre-dawn prayers, as usual, in the mist-shrouded open-air compound called Camp 4 on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010, the day President Barack Obama had set as the deadline for closure of the prison camps at the U.S. Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

These are days of uncertainty at Guantánamo Bay -- for the prisoners, contractors and sailors who will remain.

Once a storage depot for Cold War missiles, this military base is quiet these days, with miles of oak and pine, freshwater marshes, fishing piers, and a sleepy golf club.

The Pentagon has placed its newest camp strictly out of bounds for both media and military defense attorneys.

A Miami Herald investigation found that six years after Guantánamo Bay received its first 20 detainees from Afghanistan, seven have been released.

The first surprise may be that the most damning, enduring images of the prison camps at Guantánamo were taken by a U.S. sailor. It was his job, on assignment to an elite Defense Department unit called Combat Camera at the remote Navy base that day the first detainees arrived Jan. 11, 2002.

All four captives who killed themselves at the prison camps for suspected terrorists hanged themselves in their cells with craftily fashioned nooses, a senior officer said.

Fed by the Internet, the phenomenon has spread across the planet with blinding speed, transforming a place into an icon, perhaps like never before. Not Nuremberg. Not Pearl Harbor. Not the Watergate.

As first prison camps admiral departs the Pentagon's showcase detention and interrogation center, he tells The Miami Herald: "The detainees ought to have the opportunity to visit with lawyers."