LONDON, June 18, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Amnesty International has condemned the Bush administration’s decision to expand its infamous Guantanamo detention camp, dashing hopes that the notorious facility would be shut down.

"The administration's announcement that it is to expand the prison is the wrong decision and will fuel worldwide concern over the stories of torture and ill-treatment, religious humiliation and arbitrary detention that are seeping from the facility," the London-based human rights watchdog said in a press release on its Web site.

A subsidiary of the controversial oil services giant Halliburton, once led by US Vice-President Dick Cheney, has been awarded a $30 million contract to build a new prison camp at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay.

Revelations of torture, mistreatment and desecration of the Noble Qur’an by its jailers to "soften" detainees have sparked a global outrage at the US, which sent mixed signals over the rising internal and external uproar that the detention camp should be shut down.

"Guantanamo has become a symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards."

Once calling the prison the "gulag of our time," the international rights watchdog said US President George W. Bush should close the jail and “disclose the situation in the USA's shadowy network of detention centers around the globe.”

The expansion contract was awarded to Kellogg Brown and Root Services Inc. to build a two-story, 220-man facility with day rooms, exercise areas, medical and dental spaces and a security control room, the Pentagon said in a statement Thursday, June 16.

It said the work to be completed by July 2006.

The decision drew fire from Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg, a critic of past contracts awarded to Halliburton, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"After all of Halliburton’s misconduct, why is the Bush administration giving them more contracts? Its just another example of how in this administration, the foxes are guarding the henhouse," he said.

The Time magazine reported in May of last year that Cheney "coordinated" the Iraq contract to his former employer before the US-led invasion of the oil-rich Arab country.

Senator Durbin compared interrogation practices at Guantanamo with methods used by the Nazis.

In recent weeks, a growing chorus of Democrats, and some Republicans, have called on the US administration to close the infamous Guantanamo detention camp.

Last week, Democrat Senator Dick Durbin compared interrogation practices at Guantanamo with methods used by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in Cambodia.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings," he said.

The American lawmaker vowed to "continue to speak out when I disagree with this administration."

Also last week, US Senators censured the Pentagon after more revelations that prisoners at Guantanamo were subjected to shocking torture techniques to extract information.

"It's not appropriate. It's not at all within the standards of who we are as a civilized people, what our laws are," Senator Chuck Hagel had said.

Guantanamo has been at the center of a political storm after a Newsweek report that military interrogators at the camp flushed a Qur’an down a toilet to rattle Muslim inmates.