In my little minefield

Diagramming party to action stations: The Miami Herald is aiming at Guantanamo, but what does it hit?

But change comes slowly to this 45-square-mile U.S. Navy base bunkered behind a Cuban minefield with small-town amenities and the population to match.

If we're going to worry about grammar, we might want to spend a little less time on how to hyphenate "war-on-terror detainees" (if they're "prisoners from the Afghanistan war," just say so) and a little more on how nouns and prepositional phrases hook up.

[On a wider point: the idea that slipping the prisoners a few Game Boys and teaching them English is a "dose of culture" that will "help men captured across the globe think for themselves" is the sort of blithe don't-get-it-ness that journalism could do with a lot less of. Every now and then, when people who don't like you "think for themselves," they come to the same conclusion they did before.]