WASHINGTON, Jan 22: With a federal court in Los Angeles due to hear a petititon for the Guantanamo Bay captives to be brought before a civil judge and told of the charges against them, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday again asserted that the prisoners were being humanely treated.

Facing a barrage of probing questions on the conditions in which the Al Qaeda\Taliban prisoners, now numbering some 150, are housed in Guantanamo, Mr Rumsfeld defended the US position at an hour-long news briefing of not calling them unlawful combatants rather than prisoners of war, saying they represented a terrorist organization and not a state.

But, he claimed, they were being handled according to the Geneva Convention, which is considered as the benchmark for the treatment of prisoners.

The defence secretary described the criticism of the Guantanamo facility as misinformed.