WASHINGTON, Nov 11: The Washington Post observed on Tuesday that the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was “a lawless human warehouse.”

In its main editorial, the paper also said that the Bush administration’s “obstinate refusal” to be governed by reasonable rules at Guantanamo Bay might have forced the US Supreme Court to take interest into the matter.

The Post said that the Supreme Court’s decision to consider whether federal courts have any power over the Guantanamo detainees was unprecedented.

“It is also possible that some of the justices, like many other Americans, are alarmed by the administration’s obstinate refusal to be governed by reasonable rules at Guantanamo, where it is holding about 660 people,” the paper said.

The Bush administration, the Post said, has all but taunted the courts to step in. “From the beginning, it has refused to comply with the strict terms of the Geneva Convention, which requires that detainees be given hearings before they are designated “unlawful combatants.” It has refused to disclose who is being held or under what standards,” the editorial points out.

The post noted that “there is no remotely neutral forum in which inmates can argue any claim they might have that they are being held in error. None of the detainees has a lawyer. And the much-ballyhooed system of military tribunals that the administration announced two years ago has, so far, resulted in zero trials, with only a handful ostensibly scheduled.”

“The administration effectively asks Americans to tolerate the indefinite detention of large numbers of people with no charge, no accountability and no seeming urgency about making the rule of law into a reality,” the Post pointed out.

“The laws of war do, as the administration contends, permit the detention of the other side’s fighters during hostilities. But those laws presuppose that hostilities will eventually end and prisoners will be released. They don’t help much in a perpetual conflict against an adversary with whom peace is unimaginable.”

But the Post also observed that the Supreme Court was not “well placed to provide a solution.”

“Such a solution,” it said, “could and should come from the administration and Congress. Both have failed in their duty to create a process that is fair and understandable, thereby creating a risk that the courts will fill the legal void. Guantanamo can’t remain a lawless human warehouse forever.