After meeting with his top national security advisers, President Bush reaffirmed Monday that the al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners being held at a U.S. base in Cuba will be called illegal combatants, not POWs. But he said he’s still weighing whether the detainees should be granted the rights prisoners are guaranteed under the Geneva Convention.

BUSH PLEDGED to treat all 158 suspected terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay humanely, but said: “These are killers.”

At a news conference with interim Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, Bush said he will listen to “all the legalisms, and announce my decision when I make it.”

The administration has faced international criticism for the treatment of the captives, and for refusing to designate them as prisoners of war, which would automatically grant them the rights under the Geneva Convention.

But Bush said, “There’s no evidence that we’re treating them outside the spirit of the Geneva Convention. I’m looking at the legalities involved. However I make my decision, these detainees will be well treated.”

The White House said Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice all agreed that the captives should not be granted the status of prisoners of war because they were not conventional soldiers.

Powell requested a review on whether to follow the Geneva Convention’s stipulations for treatment of prisoners in wartime out of concern that any U.S. troops captured in battle could be mistreated.

A decision on whether to apply the Geneva Convention to the captives could be made as early as Monday, an official said. 

By designating the prisoners as “unlawful combatants,” they can be interrogated more extensively than as POWs. Under the Geneva Convention, they could could not be subjected to open-ended interrogations, nor face the type of military tribunal proposed by the Bush administration.

Also, the Geneva Convention says prisoners of war would have to be housed in conditions similar to those of their captors, and they must be released at the end of hostilities.

If there is any ambiguity about whether a captive should be considered a POW, the Geneva Convention says a special three-person military tribunal should be convened to decide.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld walks through the grounds of Camp X-ray on Sunday after touring the facilities for detainees

 “The situation surrounding the detainees in Cuba is unlike anything we’ve faced in the past,” he said. “... What you have here are people who moved to Afghanistan from more than 30 nations for the purpose of engaging in terror, not for engaging in warfare. As we have a new kind of warfare, we have a new kind of detention system.” .

The prisoners were captured in the war on Afghanistan, launched to destroy Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaida network and their Taliban protectors. The United States has accused bin Laden of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on America that killed more than 3,000 people.

The prisoners are held in 8-by-8-foot cells with concrete floors, wooden roofs and chain-link fence walls. A Defense Department photograph showing the captives, kneeling, shackled and wearing blacked-out goggles and masks stirred international criticism over their treatment.

RUMSFELD TOURS BASE
Bush’s comments echoed those of Rumsfeld on Sunday, who said the prisoners will not be given POW status. 

The captured fighters, he said, are among the “most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.”

Rumsfeld toured the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Sunday with four U.S. senators and met with troops during his first trip to the U.S. naval base since the captives were flown in from Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld said hundreds of detainees could ultimately wind up at Guantanamo Bay and will be kept indefinitely, 

“It would be a total misunderstanding of the Geneva Convention if one considered al-Qaida, a terrorist network, to be an army,” Rumsfeld said.

He said the purpose of his visit was not to judge how the Afghan fighters were being treated.

“I have absolutely full confidence in the way the detainees are being handled and treated,” Rumsfeld said. “I am not down there for that purpose. I am down there to talk to the troops, to thank them for what they are doing.” 

SPIRITUAL NEEDS
Meanwhile, a Muslim chaplain from the U.S. military is tending to the spiritual needs of the detainees and has conducted the call to prayer over a loudspeaker system. Copies of the Quran, Islam’s holy book, have been distributed. The detainees will be allowed to grow back their beards. 

The prisoners do not seem much concerned with their surroundings or the prison food at the heavily guarded camp, said the chaplain, Navy Lt. Abuhena Saiful-Islam, who arrived last week and regularly announces the call to prayer. 

“They’re concerned about their future, their families, how to communicate with them, and things like that,” said Saiful-Islam, one of 14 Muslim clerics in the U.S. military. 

“They’re also a little worried about what’s going to happen to them — either way, guilty or not guilty. And how the investigation is going to be played out,” he said. “I don’t have any answer for them.” 

The United States has another 302 former fighters in custody in Afghanistan, but it has temporarily halted prisoner transfers to Cuba, partly to allow expansion of the detention facilities, officials said.

LEADERS EMERGING
Officials at the detention facility said Sunday that there were signs the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were trying to regroup and even set up a leadership structure to stage a rebellion, NBC’s Norah O’Donnell reported. Military guards said they have noticed a command structure emerging, with leaders surfacing during prayer sessions.

The Miami Herald reported that the most prominent inmate appeared to be the former Taliban army chief of staff, Mullah Fazel Mazloom, though U.S. commanders have refused to identify the detainees.

“We have indications that many (of the detainees) have received training, and that they are observing actions such as security procedures,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert, who heads the task force in charge of the detention missions at Camp X-ray. He said there have been “some attempts to secret away materials or to coordinate activities. Given their background and training, this is something that we have anticipated.”

CANADA HANDED OVER CAPTIVES
On Tuesday, the Canadian government reported that the country’s commandos have captured prisoners in Afghanistan and turned them over to the United States.

“We have been involved in the capturing of prisoners, yes,” Defense Minister Art Eggleton told reporters. “They were turned over to the United States military.”

He and Prime Minister Jean Chretien were immediately questioned as to how they would be treated, in light of the U.S. determination that captives it has taken in Afghanistan would not be considered prisoners of war.

Eggleton and Chretien said Canada will not insist on guarantees that the detainees not be executed, even though Canada generally refuses to extradite suspected murderers to death-penalty nations, including the United States.

“There’s nothing in international law that prevents us from turning (the prisoners) over to the United States,” Eggleton said.

Camp X-Ray far cry from N. Korea Americans remember harsh conditions, torture as POWs  SOME U.S. ALLIES, as well as human rights groups, have criticized the conditions under which the prisoners are being held and have pushed the United States to designate the detainees as prisoners of war, which would guarantee them greater protections under the Geneva Convention. U.S. officials have said the detainees are being treated humanely and that they do not qualify as prisoners of war. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit the captives.

They remember forced marches in freezing temperatures with little clothing, minuscule food rations, regular beatings, torture, executions, cramped cells with little or no light, no books or writing utensils, nothing to keep their minds off the grueling conditions.

“In the entire 6½ years I was a prisoner of war, I never saw the Red Cross,” said retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. Orson Swindle, now a federal trade commissioner in Washington, D.C.

Swindle, a former fighter pilot was shot down over Vietnam in November 1966 and remained in captivity until March 1973. 

“I was taken into a cave, tied up, put in a pit and they’d bring people in to see me ... they’d all have rocks and sticks ... and my main goal was to keep my head down so I didn’t get my eyes put out,” Swindle remembered.

In contrast, Swindle said, the detainees at Camp X-Ray are being held in open-air cells with walls of chain-link fence in tropical temperatures that hover in the low-80s. The detainees have been issued prayer (skull) caps and are allowed to pray five times a day