"Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you've got the Bush administration's prison system?" asked The Times.

WASHINGTON/LONDON, February 18, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News agencies) – Two days after the UN pressed the Bush administration to close the notorious Guantanamo detention camp, a leading US daily and the archbishop of York joined the chorus, while the administration remained adamant.

"Now the only solution is to close  Guantanamo Bay and account for its prisoners fairly and openly," The New York Times said in an editorial published on Saturday, February 18.

"The United States then needs a prisons policy that conforms to the law and to democratic principles," said the daily.

It said that "by creating Guantanamo outside the legal system" US President George W. Bush's administration is "stuck holding these 500 men in perpetuity."

According to the Times, the "handful who may be guilty of heinous crimes can never be tried in a real court because of their illegal detentions."

A report by the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva made public this week said detainees at the infamous detention center had been abused, demanding its closure.

The UN human rights experts who wrote the report were invited to  Guantanamo but declined after US authorities said they would not be permitted to interview the detainees.

The US has been holding about 500 detainees at the maximum security prison located in an isolated corner of a US naval base in Cuba since its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

What Cartoons!

The New York Times said the humiliating conditions inside the detention center were more provocative than the Danish cartoons mocking Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him).

"Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you've got the Bush administration's prison system?"

It argued that the White House stood "helpless" against the violence triggered by the drawings, considered blasphemous under Islam, largely because "it has squandered so much of its moral standing at  Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."

Twelve cartoons, one of them showing the Prophet with a bomb-shaped turban, were first published in September by Denmark 's mass-circulation daily Jyllands-Posten, and later reprinted by newspapers in many countries on the ground of freedom of expression.

The caricatures have triggered massive and sometimes violent demonstrations across the Muslim world, with no sign of abating.

Once calling the prison the "gulag of our time," Amnesty International said in a recent report that Guantanamo has become a "symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values."

Animal Farm

"To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell's 'Animal Farm'," said Sentamu.

John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, joined mounting international criticism of  Guantanamo.

"The American government is breaking international law," the second most senior cleric in the Church of England told The Independent newspaper in a front-page interview.

He urged the UN Human Rights Commission to seek - either through US courts or the International Court of Justice in The Hague – to compel Washington to either put Guantanamo detainees on trial or free them.

"The main building block of a democratic society is that everyone is equal before the law, innocent until proved otherwise, and has the right to legal representation," he said.

"The US should try all 500 detainees at  Guantanamo, who still include eight British residents, or free them without further delay. To hold someone for up to four years without charge clearly indicates a society that is heading towards George Orwell's 'Animal Farm'."

Adamant

Rumsfeld said Annan was "flat wrong" about Guantanamo . (Reuters)

However, the Bush administration remained adamant, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"We shouldn't close Guantanamo," said US Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

"To close that place, and pretend there's no problem, just isn't realistic."

Rumsfeld argued that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was "flat wrong" about Guantanamo.

"There is no torture, there is no abuse," he said. "It's being handled honorably."

He defended the decision to deny the UN human rights investigators access to the prisoners.

"If you start letting every single person who wants to go in and interview these people, then you can't manage a facility like that," he said.

Several people who were released from the notorious prison spoke about torture, sexual humiliation and deliberate insults to the Muslim faith by guards and officers.

A former Egyptian detainee said the US guards in the facility "took pleasure" in torturing the inmates.

The US Supreme Court reviewed on Friday a legal challenge by detainee at the camp.

Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan are arguing that the special military tribunals set up for the detainees are illegal.

In a case which could have far reaching implications for the other detainees, the lawyers say Hamdan should be tried by a regular US military court martial.

The Bush administration wants the Supreme Court to rule that Hamdan and other detainees have no right to take their cases before US courts.

In a landmark ruling in 2004, the US Supreme Court endorsed the right of Guantanamo detainees to challenge their captivity in American courts.

However, a law passed by Congress in December 2005 denies them access to US courts through habeus corpus - a prerogative writ ordering that a prisoner be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not he is being imprisoned lawfully.

Guantanamo detainees are back in the black hole" if they do not gain access to US courts, lawyer Eugene Fidell, an expert on military justice, told AFP.