U.S. Marshals moved the last terror suspect at the brig to Illinois in March, under Obama's order to dismantle enemy combatant policy and seek trials for captives who committed crimes.

Guantánamo and indefinite detention without trial, the president argues, eroded U.S. standing around the world and undermined its commitment to the rule of law.

Meantime, a national debate rages over where the detainees go next.

The Washington, D.C., lobby group Military Families United is collecting pledges from members of Congress to resist relocation into their community but hasn't released how many have signed on.

South Carolina state House member James Merrill even took a page from the playbook of Fidel Castro and threatened to write legislation to cut off power and water to the brig if the Pentagon moved in detainees.

In 1964, Castro threatened to cut off utilities to Guantánamo. The Pentagon put in a desalination plant and to this day produces its own power and water.

Merrill's legislation was sidelined in favor of a more generalized condemnation.

Such talk angers Heitzler, the Goose Creek mayor, who said his community has long known dangerous duty. During World War II, thousands of German and Italian POWs were interned in the area. During the Cold War, Charlestown was a strategic nuclear weapons depot.

'Nobody has said we won the war with al Qaeda. They haven't said, `We surrender.' Cutting off water and electricity? That's treason, as far as I'm concerned,'' he said.

``Their job is to terrorize. It sounds like they're being successful.''

The Obama administration isn't saying which sites it prefers. Nor has it said where it will send detainees that foreign countries won't accept, or what it will do about prisoners whose brutal interrogations make prosecution hard or impossible.

GUIDING PRECEDENT?

For now, Obama's handling of the case of Ali al Marri, 43, a Qatari who was held for years at the Charleston brig with little notice, is the blueprint of what the Obama administration says it will do with some Guantánamo prisoners.

In February, the Justice Department charged the father of five with conspiracy and supporting terrorism, alleging he was an al Qaeda sleeper agent posing as a business graduate student in Peoria, Ill., at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

It was the same allegation that years earlier led the Bush administration to arrest and hold him as an ''enemy combatant,'' under a White House power that argued he could be held and interrogated without charge for years.

In his first year at the brig, Marri was subjected to some of the brutal interrogations described in the so-called torture memos released by the Obama administration -- sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation, such mind-numbing isolation that his attorney says he hallucinated.

Navy Cmdr. Daniel Spagone, in charge of the brig, declined a request from The Miami Herald for both an interview and a tour.

Last week, rather than face trial, Marri offered a guilty plea on a charge of providing material support for terrorism. He'll be sentenced in July.

''It's setting a precedent for future detentions. I think that's clear,'' said Andy Savage, a Charleston criminal defense attorney who spent years lambasting the Bush administration for holding the Qatari man without the bedrock American protections against self-incrimination, or even a charge.

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