According to the United States' national security strategy, "America must stand firmly for the non-negotiable demands of human dignity", including "the rule of law" and "limits on the absolute power of the state".

Its national strategy for combating terrorism concludes by saying much the same thing, and adds: "We understand that a world in which these values are embraced as standards, not exceptions, will be the best antidote to the spread of terrorism. This is the world we must build today".

Instead the USA built a prison camp at its military base in Guantnamo Bay in Cuba and filled it with detainees from around the world, including a number of children. Two years after the first of these prisoners arrived, Camp X-Ray and its successor, Camp Delta, have become synonymous with a government's pursuit of unfettered executive power and disregard for the rule of law.

As detainees enter their third year held in tiny cells for up to 24 hours a day without any legal process, it seems that the current US administration views human dignity as far from non-negotiable when it comes to "national security".

The first prisoners, transferred from Afghanistan on 20-hour flights in conditions of sensory deprivation and heavy use of restraints, arrived in Guantnamo Bay on Jan 11, 2002. A photograph released by the Pentagon at this time has become an icon of unacceptable US exceptionalism.

It showed detainees in orange jumpsuits, kneeling before US soldiers, shackled, handcuffed, and wearing blacked-out goggles over their eyes and masks over their mouths and noses.

Sayed Abbasin has recalled: "I arrived tied and gagged; it was the act of an animal to treat a human being like that. It was the worst day of my life". Sayed Abbasin, arrested for being a taxi driver in the wrong place at the wrong time, is now attempting to rebuild his life in Afghanistan after a year in US custody.

His friend and fellow cabdriver, Wazir Mohammed, remains in Camp Delta, having been transferred there more than a year ago, in effect, apparently, for having sought information on Sayed Abbasin's whereabouts. For some, like Sayed Abbasin, the transfer to Cuba followed weeks of harsh treatment in US custody elsewhere.

Unlawful detention

International law has been flouted from the outset. None of the detainees was granted prisoner of war status or brought before a competent tribunal to determine their status, as the Geneva Conventions require. None has been granted access to a court to be able to challenge the lawfulness of their

detention, as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights demands. Lawyers have been denied access to the detainees, as have relatives. Hundreds of distressed families have become the "collateral damage" of this shameful policy.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has taken the unusual step of going public about the deterioration in mental health it has witnessed among many of the detainees as a result of the indefinite and isolating incarceration regime.

While some prisoners have been released, without charge or apology, and more releases are awaited, the US authorities have yet to address the issue of compensation for unlawful detention. Secretary of State Collin Powell recently acknowledged that some of the detainees still held may have done nothing wrong.

Other senior US officials have shown contempt for the presumption of innocence. The Guantnamo detainees are "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth" according to Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, while his deputy labelled them as "dangerous people ... a special breed of person". "The only thing I know for certain", President George W Bush added in July 2003, "is that these are bad people."

This pattern of public commentary is not harmless. It can only have added to the dangers that some of the detainees may face if returned to their countries. Furthermore, these three US officials will have overall control of the military commissions which may yet try some of those held in Guantnamo.

The lack of independence of these commissions, together with the restriction on the rights to an effective defence, their power to hand down death sentences, and the denial of the right of appeal to any court, has rightly led to international condemnation.

'Kangaroo courts'

A judge on the United Kingdom's highest court, for example, has suggested that any trials before these "kangaroo courts" will be a "stain on American justice".

Rumsfeld, has rejected concern about Guantnamo as "based on the shrill hyperventilation of a few people who didn't know what they were talking about". Among the voices of concern have been two United Nations high commissioners for human rights, the UN working group on arbitrary detention, the UN special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, the Inter-American commission on human rights, and the parliamentary assembly of the council of Europe.

In the introduction to his administration's national security strategy, Bush stressed that the US "is committed to lasting institutions" like the United Nations and the Organisation of American States, as well as to "long-standing alliances". It seems that this commitment does not extend to heeding their calls for the US to respect international law and standards.

Given the US' criticism of the human rights record of Cuba, it is deeply ironic that it is violating fundamental rights on Cuban soil, and seeking to rely on the fact that it is on Cuban soil to keep the US courts from examining its conduct.

Better late than never, however, there are signs that the courts will not take this lying down. Last December, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a decision in a case brought for Libyan national Faren Gherebi, among the first transferred to Cuba and still held there: "Even in times of national emergency - indeed, particularly in such times - it is the obligation of the Judicial Branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the Executive Branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike."

The court continued: "Under the government's theory, it is free to imprison Gherebi indefinitely along with hundreds of other citizens of foreign countries, friendly nations among them, and to do with Gherebi and these detainees as it will, when it pleases, without any compliance with any rule of law of any kind... Indeed, at oral argument, the government advised us that its position would be the same even if the claims were that it was engaging in acts of torture or that it was summarily executing the detainees... It is the first time that the government has announced such an extraordinary set of principles - a position so extreme that it raises the gravest concerns under both American and international law".

The US Supreme Court will shortly consider the question of whether the US courts have jurisdiction over the Guantnamo detainees. It would be a dangerous moment if the Supreme Court was to answer this question in the negative. It would be promoting a world in which arbitrary, unchallengeable detention becomes acceptable. Security does not lie down that path. As Powell has said: "States which demonstrate a high degree of respect for human rights are likeliest to contribute to international security and well being".

The Ninth Circuit noted that senior US officials "have made it clear that the detainees may be held in their present circumstances until this country's campaign against terrorism ends. The administration has, understandably, given no indications whether that event will take place in a matter of months, years, or decades, if ever." The Guantnamo scandal has already gone on for far too long. The US administration should bring it to an end now.