US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has vehemently defended the treatment of Afghan prisoners detained in Cuba as part of the US response to the September 11th attacks.
As international criticism grows, the German government took the unprecedented step of openly criticising the US failure to observe the Geneva Convention in relation to the prisoners.
Mr Rushfeld said the prisoners' detention was proper, humane and consistent with international conventions.
"These people are committed terrorists," he said. "We are keeping them off the street and out of the airlines and out of nuclear power plants and out of ports across this country and across other countries, and it seems to me a perfectly reasonable thing to do."
He gave no indication how long they would be held without charges.
The US decision to treat the prisoners as "unlawful combatants," rather than as prisoners of war has come under criticism from politicians in Ireland, Britain and throughout the European Union.
However an official German government statement today criticised the US policy, calling on Washington to treat captured Taliban and al Qaeda fighters as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Convention.
"Regarding those under arrest in Guantanamo, we are of the view that, regardless of any later definition of their status, they are to be treated as prisoners of war," German Foreign Minister Mr Joscha Fischer said in a statement.
"That means in accordance with international law and in a humanitarian way, as written in the Geneva Convention, he said.
The German government, one of the United States' closest allies, rarely openly criticises US policies.
France also insisted that the detainees should be treated in line with international law, although it stopped short of citing the Geneva Convention.
More than 150 prisoners, from a number countries, have been transferred to the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from Afghanistan.
Mr Rumsfeld hit out at media pictures showing the prisoners being detained in what many claim are inhumane conditions: "The numerous articles, statements, questions, allegations, and breathless reports on television are undoubtedly by people who are either uninformed, misinformed, or poorly informed," he said.
Pictures of the captured men in handcuffs and shackles, and wearing blacked-out goggles have drawn complaints from civil rights groups in the United States and throughout the West.
British officials were given access to three Britons being held at Guantanamo and reported they had "no complaints" about their treatment, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Monday.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which regards the detainees as prisoners of war entitled to protection under the Geneva Convention, has said the distribution of the photographs could be in breach of the convention.
AFP &