(IPS) news feature

Amid growing international controversy, the Pentagon yesterday said that it was temporarily suspending flights of al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners from Afghanistan to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Defence Department officials insisted that the delay is not related to the chorus of criticism Washington has received for its alleged mistreatment of what it insists on calling the 158 ''unlawful combatants'' or ''battlefield detainees'' who have been shipped to the base from Afghanistan over the past two weeks.

They said they had simply run out of space and needed to build more cells to accommodate any of the several hundred more prisoners US forces are holding in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, however, the White House, clearly stung by the growing global debate over the fate of the detainees, waded into the fray yesterday.

Spokesman Ari Fleischer defended the decision to house prisoners at Guantanamo and not accord them ''prisoner-of-war'' (POW) status as justified by the likelihood that, if set free, they would ''engage in murder once again''.

''These are among the worst of the worst,'' Fleischer told reporters. They are being detained because of ''their willingness, their training to go and kill, destroy, engage in suicide if they can take others with them''. He added that President George W Bush was ''perfectly satisfied'' with the conditions under which they are being held.

Exposed to the elements

Those conditions are the subject of growing concern abroad and among rights groups here, particularly in the wake of reports that the prisoners are being held in individual 2.5-by-2.5-metre concrete and chicken-wire cells exposed to the elements on two sides. Some reports have referred to the cells as ''cages''.

Adding fuel to the fire was the release several days ago of photos showing detainees kneeling before their guards with legs shackled, hands manacled, their eyes blinded by blacked-out goggles, and their mouths covered by surgical masks.

The photos created a storm of outrage in Europe where newspapers accused Washington of abuse and even torture, and, in a highly unusual move, the International Committee for the Red Cross publicly suggested that the Pentagon violated Geneva Convention rules against humiliating or making a spectacle of the prisoners by distributing the photo.

In an unusually long press appearance on Tuesday, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld conceded that the photos' release was ''probably unfortunate''. He insisted, however, that they were taken just after the prisoners had arrived at the base from their 20-hour flight from Afghanistan. The shackles and other restraints, he said, were used only when they were transported from place to place.

''I haven't found a single scrap of any kind of information that suggests that anyone has been treated anything other than humanely,'' he stressed.

Still, the fate of the prisoners remains the latest in a series of events that have created tensions over the conduct of Bush's ''war on terrorism'' between Washington on one side and some of its closest European allies, United Nations officials, and independent human rights groups on the other.

Drawn intense criticism

Bush's orders early in the military campaign in Afghanistan to create military tribunals to try al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners without any right of judicial review or other due-process safeguards have drawn intense criticism from around the world, as well as from US human rights and civil liberties groups.

So did the Pentagon's opposition to deploying peacekeeping troops to secure law and order and protect humanitarian convoys delivering relief supplies to hungry civilians in regions outside Kabul, while it was still bombing and pursuing al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in suspected mountain hideouts.

In the words of Britain's top military commander, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, Washington's ''single-minded'' was winning what he called its ''a high-tech, Wild West'' war without sufficient regard for the ''hearts and minds'' of Afghans, or the Islamic world more generally.

That controversy over the prisoners' treatment is now creating similar problems, particularly with respect to the ''hearts and minds'' struggle in the Arab world where the photos and reports of the prisoners' captivity will only fuel resentment and a sense of humiliation, according to the critics, most of whom are demanding that Washington comply with the protections given POWs under the Geneva Conventions.

If applicable, those conventions would require the prisoners to be held in humane conditions that are ''as favourable'' as those in which the US soldiers live. In addition, interrogations could be limited only to prisoners' name, rank, serial number, and birth-date; any trials would have to satisfy basic fair-trial guarantees; and, at the conclusion of hostilities, prisoners would have to be repatriated.

Moreover, if there is a doubt about a captured fighter's status as a POW, the Conventions require that he be treated as such until a competent tribunal determines otherwise.

Call to recognise detainees as POWs

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which has an ongoing mission to the Guantanamo base, Amnesty International, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, and the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have all called on Washington to recognise the detainees as POWs.

But the Pentagon argues that the prisoners fail to meet the definition of combatants entitled to protections afforded by the Conventions. It cites the 1907 standard, which requires combatants to follow a chain of command; wear a ''fixed distinctive emblem recognisable at a distance''; ''carry arms openly''; and abide by international laws of war. In its view, neither the Taliban nor al-Qaeda meets this definition.

Instead, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has insisted that Washington will treat the prisoners ''humanely'' and in general accordance with the conditions required by the Geneva Conventions, although not with any of the procedural protections that go with them.

Calling the prisoners ''committed terrorists'', Rumsfeld said Washington's top priority in keeping the prisoners was to gain information from them that would help prevent future terrorist attacks and dismantle the al-Qaeda network.

US officials say evidence obtained in Afghanistan, including from at least one high-ranking prisoner, has already prevented attacks in Asia and Bosnia, and that it would be much harder to get such information if Geneva rules permitting only limited interrogations applied.

But Amnesty, which has asked Washington to permit it to send a delegation to Guantanamo, says the continuing secrecy surrounding the prisoners, as well as the accounts of their captivity, including the photos, are cause for great concern.

''Keeping prisoners incommunicado, sensory deprivation, the use of unnecessary restraint and the humiliation of people through tactics such as shaving them, are all classic techniques employed to 'break' the spirit of individuals ahead of interrogation,'' it warned on Tuesday.