“I didn’t know whether to pack for a week or five months,” the US official said, as our Boeing 757 charter plane touched down in Cuba’s tropical heat, with turkey vultures circling overhead.

Returning from their Christmas break for the next round of hearings at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre, the defence and prosecution teams on board might have to wrap up their work a lot sooner than expected.

Aides to Barack Obama have said that the President-elect will issue an executive order declaring the closure of the prison camp on his first day in office next week. The directive will be an immediate and high-profile declaration by Mr Obama that he intends to make a clean break from the most controversial aspects of President Bush’s War on Terror.

Mr Obama’s aides have said that he is likely to suspend the tribunal system until the camp has been closed. No one has told the US military’s legal officials who flew in with The Times yesterday whether they would be required at Guantánamo Bay for only four more days — or for months of hearings still scheduled here.

Mr Obama is also expected to issue another order explicitly banning the use of torture on terror suspects and other controversial security policies, as he seeks to persuade the rest of the world that, under him, America is entering a new era where the Geneva Conventions are respected.

The President-elect conceded on Sunday that closing the prison camp will take time and is a complex issue with no easy solutions.

The first step will be the suspension of all further military commissions and hearings at the camp until it is disbanded.

Mr Obama’s transition team has already devoted much time to working on the problem of where to put the 248 detainees still held there and has contacted foreign governments, including Britain, over the possibility of them taking some.

Clive Stafford Smith, who represented British Guantánamo detainees through the legal charity Reprieve, said that Britain was “taking a lead” among other European countries who had signalled their willingness to take some of the 150 inmates deemed not to pose a threat.

The Times revealed last month that the British Government was now considering helping Mr Obama by reviewing the issue of Guantánamo detainees on a “case-by-case basis”. Britain has already taken four non-British former UK residents released from Guantánamo, and nine of its own citizens.

The incoming Obama Administration plans a new diplomatic push in the honeymoon period to persuade allies to help it to shut the notorious prison. “There is a strong impulse to help Obama out of George Bush’s mess,” Mr Stafford Smith said.

The first inmates Britain is likely to receive are two former UK residents held at Guantánamo — Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian who came to Britain as a teenage refugee, and Shaker Aamer, a Saudi married to a British woman.

A harder problem for Mr Obama is what to do with the 50 to 80 inmates deemed dangerous terror suspects. They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 terror attacks, and other high-profile members of al-Qaeda.

Yesterday the Pentagon revealed new estimates indicating that 61 former Guantánamo Bay detainees have rejoined the Islamists fighting against the US and its allies.

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