WASHINGTON: In an apparent break with the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has asked President Bush to ensure that international rules of war govern the treatment of 460 suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters who have been captured in Afghanistan and are now in US custody, administration officials said on Saturday.

The State Department urged the president to give the 158 detainees at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and another 302 under guard in Afghanistan, the protections and treatment guaranteed under the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, officials said.

Until now, the administration has insisted that the men in custody are “unlawful combatants” who do not qualify for the legal rights and privileges required under the Geneva accords.

That determination has drawn criticism from several European allies, the International Committee of the Red Cross and human rights groups. The protests escalated sharply last week after the Pentagon released a photograph of bound and shackled prisoners at Guantanamo, their heads and eyes covered, kneeling before US soldiers.

The Geneva Conventions, the critics argue, provide that military captives are presumed to be prisoners of war until a court determines otherwise. The White House has opposed conferring such formal status on the prisoners, in part because of US efforts to interrogate them about Osama bin Laden and his global Al Qaeda terror network could be severely curtailed. Under the Geneva Convention, POWs are required to provide only name, rank and serial number.

Administration officials on Saturday strongly denied that Powell’s request to redefine the prisoners’ status was an open challenge to the president. They instead portrayed it as a creative attempt to solve a contentious situation that has drawn undue attention.

But the specifics of Powell’s request, and the White House response, were both in some dispute Saturday. White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales wrote a four-page memorandum on Friday indicating that Powell wanted the president to reverse course and declare the captives prisoners of war, several officials said.

The Washington Times, which first reported the memo on Saturday, said that a cover letter written by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice asked members of the president’s war cabinet to submit their views so a memorandum could be presented to the president on Saturday afternoon.

But Sean McCormack, a National Security Council spokesman, said that the Gonzales memo was a draft and that it misstated Powell’s position. He said that Powell was not arguing that the detainees be declared prisoners of war, granting them protected legal status, but that they receive treatment consistent with the Geneva Conventions.

McCormack said that he could not confirm the National Security Council had met or made any new recommendations to Bush on the issue, but acknowledged that there was a lively legal debate over the status of the detainees. “Terrorism is difficult,” he said. “It is hard to know how to apply existing international norms to this new kind of conflict.” He took pains to argue that the debate would not materially affect the treatment of the detainees. “The real world point here is that the detainees have been and will be treated humanely and consistent with the principals of the Geneva Convention.”

A senior State Department official also described the Gonzales memo as inaccurate. He said Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had not proposed giving the captives legal status as POWs.

“The issue is not whether these people are prisoners of war,” the official said. “They are not. They’re not going to get musical instruments or monthly paychecks or any of that. Nothing will change in their treatment.”

The official said that Powell was concerned the administration not give the appearance of abandoning or ignoring the Geneva Conventions. “We’re concerned about Americans operating in other circumstances,” he said. “You don’t want to set a precedent that the convention doesn’t apply.”

Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking to a Cincinnati audience of GOP supporters, called the detainees “really bad people” who do not qualify as prisoners of war. But he said they are being treated well. “Nobody should feel defensive or unhappy about the quality of treatment they’ve received,” Cheney said. ”It’s probably better than they deserve.”

Officials from several human rights groups argued, however, that Powell’s proposed solution was no solution. “For the White House or the Defence Department to take it on themselves to make this determination, as to who is a prisoner of war and who is not, without taking it to a court, is simply not adhering to the Geneva Convention,” said Vienna Colucci, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International USA.

The Pentagon last week temporarily suspended transfers of prisoners from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, saying it had run out of space. The prisoners there are kept in 8-foot by 8-foot outdoor cages with corrugated iron roofs.

Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has fiercely defended the administration’s handling of the prisoners, is scheduled to lead a group of reporters, including several from overseas news organizations, to tour the Guantanamo camp on Sunday. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.