Feb. 24--The Obama administration on Monday repatriated to London its first Guantanamo detainee -- a chronic hunger-striker who has long claimed torture -- on the same day a senior Navy official declared the controversial prison camps humane but wracked by anxiety over the future.

"Everyone knows the camps will close. They are expecting movement," said Adm. Patrick Walsh, deputy chief of naval operations.

Walsh urged the administration to fund more improvements at the compound even as it empties it.

He advocated more communal prayer time for captives confined to solitary cells and videotaping the camps and interrogation chambers to ensure accountability. He also recommended letting family members visit and adding video conferencing to already approved annual phone calls from home.

The activity signaled the earliest phases of implementation of President Barack Obama's Jan. 22 order to empty the camps in southeast Cuba of all 240 detainees within a year.

Some would be resettled abroad, others brought to the United States for trials.

HUNGER-STRIKER

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder named a director of the review Task Force and, by Monday, Binyam Mohamed, once accused of war crimes, stepped off a plane at a British military base, a free man.

At about the same time, Holder was bound for Guantanamo on his first-ever visit.

A frequent hunger-striker, Mohammed, 30, has accused the Bush administration of outsourcing his 2002 interrogation to torture in Morocco, notably extracting false confessions of complicity in a "dirty bomb" plot by cutting his genitals with a scalpel.

Monday, he looked fit in skullcap and sweater in news photos of his arrival in Britain, the nation that had granted him residency as a teen after his family fled his native Ethiopia.

"Before this ordeal, 'torture' was an abstract word to me," he said in a statement. "It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways all orchestrated by the United States government."

He said he wasn't yet "physically nor mentally capable of facing the media."

CRITICISM

A Bush administration era architect of Guantanamo policy resurrected the dirty-bomb allegation and accused Obama of "clearly taking actions that may endanger the United States and our national interests."

Retired Navy Cmdr.