WASHINGTON: Six months after the first detainees were loaded off cargo planes from Afghanistan, their hands and feet in shackles, the 534 men hailing from 39 countries still held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, remain in legal limbo.

No charges have been publicly filed against them and they are being held indefinitely as enemy combatants in a war whose limits defy clear definition.

Saudis, Kuwaitis and Pakistanis are all held in isolated cells in the newly-constructed, state-of-the-art facility, alongside Russians, French, Belgian and British nationals — all assumed to be members of the Taliban or the Al Qaeda network led by Osama bin Laden.

They have been cast by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth.”

The administration of President George W. Bush has classified the Guantanamo detainees as “being held under the president’s authority, under the laws and usages of war.”

But the administration refuses to define them as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives, although it has said it would abide by the rules dictated by the conventions.

As foreign nationals held off US soil, the detainees have no access to lawyers. Even the identities of those who continue to submit to regular interrogations as part of the US campaign against ‘terrorism’ have been concealed.

Three lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the detainees, with the hope that their circumstances can be examined by the light of day. The legal proceedings have been firmly opposed by the Bush administration.

“The government position is that these guys don’t have any rights and that no one has any right to bring any legal protection, so that they can keep them forever without any legal protection,” noted Joseph Margulies, a lawyer for two British and one Australian national among the prisoners.

“We consider it is unlawful to hold them indefinitely.”

While some detainees used a hunger strike in March to express their anger at their indefinite detention, Gen Michael Lehnert, in charge of the Guantanamo operations, made assurances that should the detainees be found innocent of serious crimes they will be returned home.

Just one among them has been released so far.

US authorities continue to weigh several options for the fate of the men, who were issued copies of the holy Quran, and shorn of their beards when they arrived in Cuba. Those foreign nationals suspected of terrorism could appear in front of a special military court, or a civil court. They could be deported, freed or remanded to the custody of their home nation.

France, with six known nationals among the detainees, is one of several countries that has let it be known that it would prefer to try and convict the men on home turf.

For now, the detainees remain isolated from the world and from one another, their days, punctuated only by the recital of the American pledge of allegiance and the five-time-daily Muslim call to prayer over the camp’s loudspeakers.—AFP