WASHINGTON, Jan 15: There has been little media coverage of the conditions in which Al Qaeda/Taliban prisoners flown by the United States from Kandahar to the naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba, are being kept, but the New York-based Human Rights Watch has now joined Amnesty International in drawing attention to the prisoners’ confinement.

About 50 of them are now at the camp, and they have reportedly been put in unsheltered cages with tin roofs. The cages are surrounded by several perimeters of chain-link and razor wires for maximum security.

The cages, according to the World Socialist Website, have no walls and the prisoners are, thus, exposed to the climate.

Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch said during a television programme on Monday the prisoners were being kept in conditions that were clearly inhumane. He agreed that the detainees were dangerous men, but stressed that foreign prisoners must be treated in the same way as the US would expect American prisoners to be treated.

The London-based Amnesty International last week also criticised the hooding and chaining of the prisoners as they were being moved from their places of detention to Kandahar airport. The American Muslim Council has protested against the shaving off of the beards of the detainees. The authorities at Guantanamo say the prisoners have had their hair and beards shaved to prevent lice infestation.

The US argues that the prisoners are illegal combatants and calls them detainees instead of prisoners of war. The Geneva Convention on the treatment of PoWs provides no real guidelines on how “illegal combatants” (that is, those not in uniform of an established army) should be treated, but Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

has said every effort will be made to follow international regulations. The US has also said it is willing for human rights organizations to visit the Guantanamo facility.

More prisoners are to be moved to the base from Kandahar, where some 500 men are now believed to be in US custody. There is no information here yet about Pakistanis among the prisoners at Kandahar or Guantanamo. A British citizen is reported to be at Guantanamo, and British consular officials are said to have been informed about him.

The World Socialist Website has speculated that Guantanamo has been chosen as a secure location because if the prisoners were kept on US soil, there might have been legal challenges to their confinement.