Human rights groups have criticised how the US is dealing with its al-Qaeda captives on its naval base in Cuba. Patrick Smyth in Washington explains the American strategy.
'They are an international community of suspected terrorists from all over the world," Gen Mike Lehnert told the journalists. "These are not nice people. Several have publicly stated here their intent to kill an American before they leave Guantanamo Bay. We will not give them that satisfaction."
The journalists watched from 400 yards away as the new contingent of shackled prisoners were escorted on Wednesday from their plane into the camp that will be their home for months. It is a place of razor wire and heavily armed guards on high alert.
There are close on a hundred former fighters from Afghanistan, which will rise to 600 as a new permanent prison is built to replace the open-air, chain-link cells where the first arrivals are held.
Here they will first be interrogated and identified, the intention being eventually to release the smaller fry while putting the big fish of al-Qaeda and the Taliban on trial.
Their conditions and their status have become a cause of growing controversy, not so much in the US, but among allies - most notably over the US refusal to designate the former fighters as prisoners of war under the terms of the Geneva Conventions.
The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has told reporters that "we do plan to, for the most part, treat them in a manner that is reasonably consistent with the Geneva Conventions, to the extent that they are appropriate ... There are a bunch of lawyers who are looking at all these treaties and conventions and everything, trying to figure out what is appropriate."
He was careful to refer to the prisoners as "unlawful combatants" or "battlefield detainees", categories that leave the men in an ambiguous legal limbo that experts suspect may be necessary for the US purpose of trying many of them in special military tribunals. That, in part, is likely also to be the reason for the selection of the Cuban base as a place of detention - not being on US soil, access to the US court system is severely curtailed.
The US authorities insist that the conditions of detention are humane, if admittedly spartan.
"Each detainee has an Isomat to lay on," Gen Lehnert, the camp commander, showed the visiting press, holding up an inch-thick piece of foam. "It isn't particularly comfortable. It is also the same thing issued every day to our soldiers and marines in the field. I myself have spent a good portion of my Marine Corps career on one of these mats." He said the prisoners have toothpaste and showers and roofs over their heads. They get three meals a day, two hot, and all "culturally sensitive". They have buckets to slop out.
Holding up a day-glow orange prison outfit, the general said: "They get a jump suit." But revealing a little frustration with all the international scrutiny, he added, "They don't get to pick the colour." But human rights groups are not happy with the outdoor cells or the forced haircuts which prisoners had to undergo, allegedly for delousing.
"If US POWs were ever kept under these conditions, the United States would complain, and rightly so," James Ross, a senior legal adviser with the New York-based Human Rights Watch says.
Yet if the camp commander can reasonably easily reassure critics that the conditions will not be unduly harsh, the US has a genuine problem about the prisoners' status. This was no ordinary war between states, with a beginning and an end, and these are by no means traditional POWs.
"I don't think anything quite like this was envisioned when the Geneva Conventions were drawn up," says Tom Farer, dean of Denver University's Graduate School of International Studies and a former special assistant to the Defence Department's special counsel.
Under the terms of the Geneva Conventions POWs, who are defined have a number of specific rights, must be treated properly, not subjected to brutality or forced interrogation, and must be housed in conditions that bear some equivalence to those of the troops holding them.
But, crucially, they can only be tried for war crimes in the same courts and according to the same rules as soldiers of the country holding the prisoners. In this case it would mean a standard trial before court martial and under the US Uniform Military Code of Justice. That would give the prisoners the right to a three-tier appeal system reaching possibly to the Supreme Court.
"This is one reason why the Americans are nervous about applying the POW convention in all its glory," Adam Roberts, an expert on international law at Oxford, told the Christian Science Monitor. The special military tribunals envisaged by President Bush would function under rules of evidence which would not be as stringent as those of courts martial and would allow greater use of secret testimony to protect intelligence sources. They could also, to the serious disquiet of European allies, impose the death penalty.
The US is also perturbed by the requirement of the conventions that prisoners who have not been convicted of war crimes should be repatriated when the war is over. Yet many of those being held do not recognise that the jihad they have been fighting is over and will continue to be a threat to the US.
When exactly is the war over? The law is not clear. Can the US engage in preventive detention of those whom it does not wish to, or can not, charge with specific crimes? Not under the terms of the Geneva Conventions in the absence of war.
The position is complicated by the Convention on Torture which requires that prisoners not be deported to nations where they could be abused. Before returning detainees to such countries as China, Uzbekistan, or Saudi Arabia, the US must get guarantees on their treatment.
What is the US to do instead? Free them in the US? Almost as worrying to US officials is the prospect that many governments may simply release them.
US officials say it is arguable the prisoners are not covered by the Geneva Conventions because they were "bands of people that I don't think would meet the criteria of organised military activity", as Pentagon spokeswoman Susan Hanson put it.
Under the Geneva Conventions, captured fighters are POWs if they wear uniforms and insignia and are part of an identifiable army or militia that obeys the laws of war. Such a definition may well encompass Taliban fighters, the soldiers of the Afghan government, while excluding those of al-Qaeda.
"We say they should be presumed to be POWs, and it is not up to the ICRC or to the US military authorities to decide, but up to the courts," Michael Kleiner, an ICRC spokesman, says. He recalls that a US court determined that former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a POW, despite US refusal to when he was captured.
Human Rights Watch's US director, Kenneth Roth, warns: "Terrorists believe that anything goes in the name of their cause. The fight against terror must not buy into that logic."