WASHINGTON, Jan 23: Faced with mounting international criticism, the US military has put on hold transfers of prisoners from Afghanistan to the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, US military officials said on Wednesday.

The officials insisted the pause was not in response to the outpouring of concern over the prisoners treatment, but gave contradictory reasons for the action.

President George W. Bush was “perfectly satisfied” that the military was upholding US traditions of humane treatment of prisoners while protecting the troops guarding them, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

“These are not mere innocents, these are among the worst of the worst,” he said.

A spokesman for the US Southern Command in Miami, Florida, which is responsible for the base at Guantanamo, said the transfers of prisoners were being held up by deliberations within the US government over arrangements for an intelligence center at the base.

“We’ve been told they’re going to pause the flow while they make these preparations to make sure everything is all right,” said Steven Lucas, a spokesman for the command.

He said it was not known how long transfers from Afghanistan would be held up but “there’s no reason to anticipate it’s going to be a very long pause.”

The center will include facilities for interrogating the prisoners and communications links for gathering and disseminating information.

Lucas said, however, the delay was related not to the intelligence center’s physical plant, as other Pentagon officials suggested, but to “inter-agency coordination.”

The government agencies involved “have to coordinate their activities, their crews and their staffing for operating a joint inter-agency intelligence center.”

“I think it is probably not inappropriate to pause to make sure we’re all set up to exploit any information that can be gained from these people in the most expeditious manner,” he said.

The last flight carrying prisoners from Kandahar arrived at Guantanamo Bay on Monday, raising to 158 the number of captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters detained at the base.

Another 270 are being held by the US military in Afghanistan.

One Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, indicated that the transfers were being held up to complete construction of the interrogation facility and because they were running short of cells to put prisoners without doubling them up.

Lucas, however, said cell space was not an immediate concern.

“We will be continuing to bring detainees in as we have the capacity and capability to deal with them,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. “SouthCom is working very hard to improve or increase the capacity to deal with detainees.”

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday responded to criticism of the US handling of the detainees, insisting it was appropriate, humane and in keeping with international conventions.

Some US allies have expressed concern over the US decision to designate the detainees as “unlawful combatants” with no clearly defined legal status rather than as “prisoners of war” with specific rights under the Geneva Convention.

The prisoners, considered extremely dangerous by the Pentagon, have been flown to Guantanamo Bay in shackles, earmuffs and black-out goggles, restraints Rumsfeld said were reasonable.—AFP