MB Civic

Last Wednesday, after spending four days reporting from the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, three newspaper reporters and a photographer were ordered off the island by the Pentagon.

But it is not clear why they were banished.

The journalists, from The Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald and The Charlotte Observer, left Guantánamo after reporting on the suicides of three prisoners.

The Charlotte Observer said its reporter, who was originally assigned to write a profile on a military commander at the base, may have obtained too many details about the military’s response to the suicides, leading the Pentagon to impose new restrictions on reporters.

Others have suggested that the decision was a bureaucratic tussle between the public affairs office at the Pentagon and military commanders on the base.

The Pentagon said it removed the reporters in an attempt to level the field with other reporters who had been denied access to the base after the suicides. The decision prompted protests from several lawyers representing prisoners and from Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for journalists.

But the abrupt expulsions also reflect the continuing tensions between the military personnel who oversee the base, which has served as a prison camp for suspected terrorists since early 2002, and reporters who are trying to gather information in the highly secure environment.

Journalists have complained that they are banned from interviewing detainees, that their movements around the base are tightly controlled and that they receive little information from public affairs personnel.

“Everybody would like unfettered access, come and go as you please, talk to everybody you want to, but that’s not what this is,” said Dave Wilson, the managing editor for news at The Miami Herald. “We understand that and have tried to work with it.”

Reporters who visit Guantánamo are usually reluctant to criticize the military publicly because it controls their access to the base. Once there, reporters are paired with “minders,” who organize and restrict their movements and escort them around the grounds.

The latest skirmish between the military and the press began June 10, when the Pentagon announced that three detainees had hanged themselves in their cells. A group of reporters already had been planning to travel to Guantánamo on a military plane from Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, to cover the scheduled hearing of an Ethiopian detainee on June 12. But after the suicides, the Pentagon quickly canceled the hearing and the reporters’ flight.

Two reporters, Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald and Carol J. Williams of The Los Angeles Times, who were traveling by a different route, were also notified by the Pentagon on June 10 that the hearing had been canceled and they were no longer authorized by the Pentagon to visit the base. But they requested authorization from the prison’s commander to visit anyway. Permission was granted, and they boarded their small commercial flight as planned.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Cynthia Smith, said it was unfair for those three reporters to be allowed at Guantánamo when others had been denied access. “We want to be fair and impartial,” Ms. Smith said. “We couldn’t just give them an exclusive.”

One reporter, Michael Gordon of The Charlotte Observer, and Todd Sumlin, a photographer for the paper, were already on the base, preparing a profile of Col. Michael Bumgarner, a prison commander and a native of Kings Mountain, N.C., near Charlotte.

Rick Thames, the editor of The Charlotte Observer, said the Pentagon was unhappy with articles Mr. Gordon had filed, including an account of a morning staff meeting on June 12 led by Colonel Bumgarner.

Mr. Gordon had quoted Colonel Bumgarner as telling the staff, “The trust level is gone,” referring to the detainees. “They have shown time and time again that we can’t trust them any farther than we can throw them.” Mr. Thames of The Observer said, “We can’t be certain, but we believe the Pentagon was uneasy with close-up access to the operations of the prison at a time of crisis,” adding, “Clearly, they were at odds over this.”

Ms. Rosenberg of The Miami Herald said it was difficult to report from Guantánamo but that occasionally it was possible to obtain useful insights.

“When you’re there, you actually get to make requests and sometimes speak directly to people who work in the camps, who make decisions, who carry out investigations and who give you the information that is not distilled,” she said. “I think the art of reporting at Guantánamo is to ask for interviews and get interviews with people who can talk about the jobs they’re doing.”

Ms. Smith, the Pentagon spokeswoman, said that there had been no change in Pentagon policy regarding the media and that reporters from three overseas news organizations — Deutsche Welle, Le Parisien and The Times of London — are to visit this week.