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Gitmo staff discusses detainees' treatment

WASHINGTON - Many detainees at Guantanamo Bay were regularly subjected to harsh and coercive treatment, several people who worked in the prison said in recent interviews with the New York Times, despite longstanding assertions by military officials that such treatment had not occurred except in some isolated cases.

The people - military guards, intelligence agents and others - left unnamed by the newspaper, described procedures that included treatment they said was highly abusive occurring over a long period of time, as well as rewards for prisoners who cooperated.

One regular procedure described by people who worked at Camp Delta, the main prison facility at the naval base in Cuba, was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underpants, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and screamingly loud music played through two loudspeakers, while the air conditioning was turned up, said one military official who witnessed the procedure.

Such sessions could last up to 14 hours with breaks, said the official, who described the treatment after being contacted by the New York Times.

Pentagon officials would not comment on the details of the allegations. Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico issued a Defense Department statement in response to questions about the new accounts, saying that the military was providing a "safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism."

VATICAN CITY - Thousands of well-wishers have showered Pope John Paul II with greetings for the 26th anniversary of his election as pontiff, many of them thanking him for speaking out against preventive war, his spokesman said Saturday.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls told Vatican Radio that while many of the greetings came from VIPs, several thousand were sent by "common people, some Catholic, some not, some not even Christians." The spokesman said they thanked the pope "for his teaching on specific subjects like peace, family, dialogue, tolerance, human dignity."

NEW DELHI - India's 5-month-old governing coalition received a major boost Saturday when the ruling Congress Party won a solid victory over Hindu nationalist parties in a state election that had been widely seen as a test of the new government.

Congress and its allies won 139 of 288 seats in the legislature of Maharashtra, India's wealthiest and second-most-populous state, with a population of almost 100-million.

The outcome was an important victory for the Congress Party, for the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and especially for Sonia Gandhi, who renounced her claim to the prime minister's job in May but continues to lead the Congress Party.

MADRID, Spain - Cuban authorities denied entry to a conservative Spanish politician and two Dutch colleagues hoping to meet with dissidents, Spain's Foreign Ministry said Saturday.

Cuba's ambassador to Madrid, Isabel Allende, was summoned urgently to explain what the Spanish government considers an "unacceptable" expulsion, the ministry said in a statement.

The incident threatened to ignite a diplomatic spat just days after Spain's new Socialist government said it wanted to improve relations with Cuba and lead the European Union in changing its policies toward the communist-run island.