The suicides, they said, highlighted the concern for the mental health of detainees.

The men who committed suicide were later identified as Saudi Arabians Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi and Yassar Talal Al-Zahrani, and Yemeni Ali Abdullah Ahmed.

They were the first to die at the base in Cuba since the U.S. began holding terrorism suspects there in 2002.

Many of those in custody are carrying out a prolonged hunger strike to protest against their conditions.

Speaking from the White House lawn on Wednesday, U.S. President George W. Bush said he is waiting for guidance from the Supreme Court before determining what to do with the facility.

"I'd like to close Guantanamo," Bush said. "But I also recognize that we are holding some people that are darn dangerous."

The court is expected to rule this month whether detainees may be tried before military commissions or can challenge their cases in federal court.

Bush said that detainees have been sent home on a continual basis and that those remaining will eventually receive counsel and a hearing in court.

The five envoys, who come from Algeria, Austria, Pakistan and New Zealand issued a report in February decrying the arbitrary nature of the detentions and the inhuman and degrading conditions. The UN representatives were not permitted to visit the prison.

Meanwhile, an Afghan delegation returning from a 10-day visit to Guantanamo Bay said they were allowed to visit all 96 Afghan prisoners currently detained.

A representative from the Afghan Interior Ministry said the conditions were "humane" and that there were few complaints from the men regarding their living conditions.

He acknowledged that Guantanamo is seen by some countries as an example of the United States not upholding the values it espouses on human rights.

"No question, Guantanamo sends, you know, a signal to some of our friends -- provides an excuse, for example, to say, 'The United States is not upholding the values that they're trying encourage other countries to adhere to,'" Bush said.

Two Saudis and a Yemeni hanged themselves with clothes and bedsheets at the prison for foreign terrorism suspects on Saturday.

The suicides were the first deaths of prisoners at Guantanamo, although there have been many previous suicide attempts and hunger strikes since the United States began sending suspected al Qaeda and Taliban captives there in 2002.

Nearly all the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held without charge and some have been detained for more than three years. The 460 foreigners in the prison were captured mainly in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led war there to oust the Taliban and al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule this month on the legitimacy of special military tribunals set up to try some of the prisoners for war crimes. Ten detainees face hearings before the tribunals.

Bush said the United States was also in a difficult position in some of the cases in which it wants to send prisoners back to their home countries but such moves have been criticized.

"Of course, sometimes we get criticized for sending some people out of Guantanamo back to their home country because of the nature of the home countries -- a little bit of a Catch-22," Bush said.

He added that a lot of detainees have been sent back already. "I don't think the American people know that, nor do the citizens of some of the countries that are concerned about Guantanamo," Bush added.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, 287 detainees have left Guantanamo. That includes 192 who have been released and 95 who were transferred to the custody of other governments.

TONY JONES: Those are pretty dramatic statements you are making. I would have to say, though, the Red Cross is about to go and do an urgent inspection of the prison and it does appear that their reports back in 2004 do back up a lot of what you are saying. They also decided that what was happening at Guantanamo Bay amounted to a system of torture.

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: They argued that it wasn't just isolated cases. They said that the entire system of treatment of detainees, designed to do one thing, and one thing only - extract information - constituted a system of cruelty, a system of torture. No qualification, not tantamount to torture - a phrase they'd used before - but torture per se. Confinement at Guantanamo constitutes torture. The question is, what kind of torture? It is psychological torture. Not the conventional, physical, brutal torture, but a distinctively American form of torture - psychological torture.

TONY JONES: I'm going to come to the history of how you say that form of torture was evolved by the CIA. Can I first go, though, to some of the most compelling testimony I've read in the account you've given recently in your essay to the Monthly magazine and that comes from FBI officers who visited Guantanamo Bay. Can you tell us, first of all, why they were visiting and why they were writing these reports?

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Sure. The FBI has for the past 60 years, until the start of the war on terror, been in charge of US counter-intelligence and, indeed, the investigation of East African bombings by al-Qaeda in 1998, for example, were handled by the FBI. So the FBI is a partner with the CIA and military intelligence in the war on terror generating intelligence to fight the war on terror. Now, there's a distinct difference between the CIA methods and the FBI methods. The CIA have allowed the Bush White House to use enhanced techniques whose sum is indeed torture. The FBI, reflecting its legal culture, do not torture. The FBI use a form of torture we might call empathetic interrogation. That is to say, you form a bond with the subject - the interrogator and the subject develop a personal relationship and through this relationship you get accurate, reliable, non-coerced intelligence and information that, by the way, will stand up in a court of law. So the FBI are down at Guantanamo and they have been appalled by what they saw. The standard techniques used on countless detainees - blasted with sound, blasted with light, confined in the dark, short shackled, long shackled. Now, all of the techniques that the FBI describe and literally dozens of emails from Guantanamo are basically describing the two foundational techniques that are key to the CIA psychological torture paradigm. That is self-inflicted pain in the form of -

TONY JONES: OK. Sorry to interrupt you there, Dr McCoy. Once again I will come to the history of how that evolved in just a moment and we'll talk in more detail about it. I'm very interested in what specifically the FBI officers reported about how individuals were treated. You spoke in general terms and in your essay you talk about some specific cases - people they found unconscious on the ground in cells and so on.

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Right. People that were short-shackled to the floor for days at a time. One detainee so desperate that overnight he pulled his hair out, hair by hair. Others covered in faeces, their own waste. Many detainees suffering signs of psychological breakdown. Another thing the FBI established very clearly is that these techniques were of course counter-productive. The FBI would often start interviews and after one of their subjects was subjected, for example, to a regime of strobe lights or blasting rock music, that when the FBI tried to conduct their next interview, the detainees were suddenly hostile and non-cooperative.

TONY JONES: There was evidence the FBI officers saw of people being broken psychologically?

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Oh, no doubt about it. Absolutely. They described detainees huddling, quivering, signs of extreme psychological stress. There is also the documented case of the famed detainee Rasul, who was subjected to these techniques of rock music, strobe lights, extreme isolation in a darkened cell for a period much less than David Hicks, by the way, and Rasul was so desperate to end this regime of treatment that shown a video of 40 Jihadists in Afghanistan seated beside Osama bin Laden, he falsely identified himself as one of the jihadists and it wasn't until an agent of MI5 arrived from Guantanamo and established he had been a clerk in an electronics shop in the United Kingdom and not a jihadist in Afghanistan at the time he said he was that the US officers realised he'd given false information in order to end this harsh treatment.

TONY JONES: We should note at this point that Shafiq Rasul was in fact released. The British caused him to be released. I gather he's now back in Britain, but he's a co-litigant, is he not, with David Hicks in the case against the US President?

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Well, he was a co-litigant with David Hicks in the landmark decision called Rasul v Bush. David Hicks was the initial litigant, he was the first one, that case started in February 2002, right after detainees began arriving in Guantanamo Bay and David Hicks through his persistence, his refusal to capitulate, his refusal to be broken remained one of the longest standing litigants in that case. The result was a stunning rebuke for the Bush Administration by the US Supreme Court. The Bush Administration had taken the position that Guantanamo Bay is not US territory. The US naval installation at Guantanamo is not US territory and thus was not subject to US courts. The Supreme Court ruled in that landmark case Rasul v. Bush, that indeed Guantanamo is US territory and is thus subject to habeus corpus writs resulting in 160 cases being filed on behalf of 300 detainees. That decision is going to be further tested either this month or next in another landmark case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which will test, by the way, the legality of the military commissions. David Hicks is also very significant in the military commissions because as detainee 002 on the Pentagon's list he was picked to be the first of those 700 detainees tried by the military commissions.

TONY JONES: OK. Let me take you back now into history and back into your book and your research essentially, Question of Torture. The history of the CIA's attempts to break people through interrogation stem right back to the Cold War and to a point where the CIA believed the Soviets had made huge advances on psychological techniques; is that so?

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: That's correct. In the deepest darkest days of the Cold War initially as a defensive move, the CIA launched a massive mind control project to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with research expenses reaching up to $1 billion a year at peak in the 1950s and the first breakthrough in this massive project came at McGill University. It was actually a joint Canadian, British, US effort, top-secret effort, and Dr Donald O. Hebb at McGill University found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in a subject within 48 hours. Now, what had the doctor done? Hypnosis, electroshock, LSD, drugs? No. None of the above. All Dr Hebb did was take student volunteers at McGill University where he was head of Psychology, put them in comfortable airconditioned cubicles and put goggles, gloves and ear muffs on them. In 24 hours the hallucinations started. In 48 hours they suffered a complete breakdown. Dr Hebb noted they suffered a disintegration of personality. Just goggles, gloves and ear muffs and this discovered the foundation, or the key technique which has been applied under extreme conditions at Guantanamo. The technique of sensory disorientation. I've tracked down some of the original subjects in Dr Hebb's experiments of 1952 and men now in their 70s still suffer psychological damage from just two days of isolation with goggles, gloves and ear muffs. David Hicks was subjected at peak to 244 days of isolation, the most extreme isolation in the 50-year history of these CIA psychological torture techniques. David Hicks has suffered untold psychological damage that will take a great deal of care, a great deal of treatment and probably the rest of his life to move beyond. To say that David Hicks has not been tortured, to say that David Hicks is only suffering from a sore back, a statement that's been made by the Foreign Minister, I think that just flies in the face of a fact. It represents an ignorance of what torture is, particularly what psychological torture is.

TONY JONES: Do you have any direct evidence that David Hicks was subject over a prolonged period to the sort of things you're talking about, sensory deprivation on that scale with hoods and masks and so on because from what I've read he was subjected to that in the very early days for a short period of time.

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: That's correct, yes.

TONY JONES: And then he was put in solitary confinement.

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Yes, he was put in an extreme form of solitary confinement for 244 days. OK? A dark cell denied any sunlight, denied any emotional support. His contact limited to once a week visits with his military chaplain, OK? So imagine that? 244 days locked up inside a cell with no human contact, no sunlight. That's an extreme form of sensory disorientation. That leads to tremendous psychological damage and when Hicks' civilian attorney Joshua Dratel first met him for the first time he found Hicks was in a severely damaged and stressed psychological state, obsessed with himself, unable to grasp reality and unable to focus on the real issues in this case. Showing all the signs, the same kind of signs that the FBI noted in their emails about the treatment of other Guantanamo detainees. Treatment by the way that the International Red Cross has called torture.

TONY JONES: Alfred McCoy, one of the strange things about the Hicks case is he appears to have virtually incriminated himself in a freely given interview with the Australian Federal Police where over a very long period of time he spells out - and evidently under no duress - he spells out how he had training in three phases in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Given that he openly gave that information to Australian interrogators, why would there be any need to torture him?

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Guantanamo itself is a system of torture, OK? The complete isolation, the harsh conditions, the daily harsh treatment, that is a carefully constructed system, designed to break down the detainees. Now, why was David Hicks being singled out to be broken down? Very simply he was picked to be the first detainee among 700 placed before the military commissions. I think the Guantanamo Administration was trying to break him down in order to have him capitulate, co-operate and legitimate what is in fact an illegal, an uncivilised form of military justice that's been repudiated by the United Nations Commission on torture and indeed 76 eminent Australian journalists and the Attorney-General of the United Kingdom. So this was designed to break Hicks down and make him capitulate and co-operate with the military commission, something he's not done. Something that he's resisted in a way that very few of the other detainees have been able to do.

TONY JONES: Although some might argue that in fact it's his lawyers who are resisting and delaying the process of the military tribunals. That's what the Australian Government says, that you could actually have gone through this process a lot quicker and Hicks could be in some more formal system of justice now, if only he'd gone through the military tribunals.

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Look, the military tribunals have been repudiated by the UN committee on torture and one of the reasons that the UN committee on torture in their recent meeting in Geneva called for Guantanamo to be closed - and this was a committee made up of 10 eminent international jurors, because they said that the military commissions do not constitute a legitimate form of justice, OK? This is not a court martial under the uniform court of military justice. This is a system that's been described by the Attorney-General of the United Kingdom as a mockery of justice. The official legal observer at Guantanamo, Lex Lasry QC, used similar words calling it a mockery of justice. Those 76 eminent Australian lawyers, including four former judges, have called it an affront to civilised standards. So David Hicks by refusing to capitulate, by refusing to confess, falsely perhaps, but to confess and to cooperate by persisting in his insistence upon his innocence, has in fact resisted and his lawyers are representing his will. Let's not diminish the courage of the man.

TONY JONES: Alfred McCoy, we'll have to leave you on that note. We thank you for coming in to talk to us tonight and perhaps one day in the future with your perspective we can bring you in on a debate on this subject. Thank you very much for being there tonight.

PROFESSOR ALFRED MCCOY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN: Thank you very much.

The death of Zharani and two other detainees last week has reignited resentment in the Arab world over the prison that holds more than 450 people, mainly Arab and Muslim men, almost all without charge.

The U.S. administration says most of the facility's detainees are hardened al-Qaeda radicals caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan who must remain incarcerated so as not to stage new attacks on Americans.

Zharani's father, Talal, a fit, bearded 52-year-old retired police colonel, said he believes his son was either hanged by guards or beaten to death by them. The body has not been returned; the father has asked the Saudi government to demand an independent autopsy and investigation.

Sitting with his youngest son and son-in-law in his third-floor apartment Tuesday, Zharani said that when the truth is revealed, it could lead to the closure of the detention facility. "When we expose their crime to the world, then the price for my son's life will have been the freedom of the other prisoners," he said. "I want Yassar to be the last person to die in Guantanamo."

Yassar Zharani was born in the coastal city of Yanbu, the third of nine children. He was the second of three boys, and he spent a lot of time with his mother and sisters and enjoyed amusing them. "He used to sing children's songs to make us laugh," recalled his mother, Umm-Muhammed, 43.

She wore mourning clothes Tuesday, a long-sleeved black shirt and long brown skirt, her hair in a ponytail.

She's not sure why Zharani went to Afghanistan, she said, adjusting her silver glasses. In the summer of 2001, he had just finished 11th grade, and he got permission from his father to go to the United Arab Emirates to take English-language and computer courses. The next thing she knew, he was in Afghanistan.

Zharani's father said he believes his son was working for a relief organization there and got dragged into the war after the U.S.-led invasion that October toppled the ruling Taliban.

But a young man who was recently released from Guantanamo said he had met Zharani several times in northern Afghanistan before the invasion and knew him as a Taliban foot soldier fighting against the Northern Alliance, the country's main anti-Taliban group at the time. The young man, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he was captured with Zharani in Mazar-e-Sharif in post-invasion hostilities and took part in a prison uprising there with him.

Saad al-Azmi, a Kuwaiti man who was freed from Guantanamo last year, said in an interview that he spent about a week in a cell next to Zharani's. "He used to be gone for hours," he said. "He told me they used to strip him to his underwear, bind his hands and feet together with iron shackles, and pour cold water on him. He said they wanted to know things about Afghanistan."

Azmi said he didn't get a chance to learn more because Zharani was moved. But right before Azmi's release last November, Zharani was still being interrogated, he said. "Word went around the prison blocks to pray for Yassar, among a group of others who were being pushed hard, because he was being interrogated through the night," Azmi said.

Azmi dissents from the common view here that Yassar did not kill himself. "His body was a bit frail, he was young. It wasn't just a short period of torture, it was years of torture. It's very possible he wanted to end it," he said.

Zharani was 17 when he arrived at Guantanamo, making him one of the youngest prisoners. Azmi and others who knew him there said that despite his youth he was always trying to cheer the others up, saying that it was God who was putting them through this ordeal and that He would end it soon. Because of the location of his cell, and his extensive knowledge of the Koran, he also often led them in prayers.

He spoke constantly about his mother, how much she must be missing him, and boasted often that his father treated him like a man despite his age, taking him out with him to adult gatherings and relying on him to drive his mother around in the pickup truck he'd bought him when he turned 16.

But he also had a temper. One former detainee recalls that Zharani returned his Koran to the facility's imam because he was disturbed that soldiers had searched or moved it, in his mind a desecration, while he was out during prison walks or in interrogation. When guards tried to return it, he refused to take the book back. Finally, half a dozen guards in riot gear entered his cell, shackled him and returned the Koran by force, the detainee recalled.

Zharani's letters from prison did not mention any of this. On Tuesday, his mother picked up a ream of letters scrawled in spidery Arabic writing. One letter, dated Dec. 30, 2002, contained these words: "And don't be sad if you are believers. God's deliverance is near." She read from another sheet. "Don't worry. God will unite us. I will be home soon."

Last month, with the release of 15 Saudi prisoners from Guantanamo, his family's hopes were also raised. Zharani's mother recalled that she was seated on the floor Saturday, praying in one of her daughter's rooms, when her husband came home from a trip to Mecca unexpectedly. "I told my daughter, 'Go see your father -- he's home. I hope that soon Yassar will walk in on us, just like that, unexpectedly.' "

But her husband walked into the room, knelt down beside her and hugged her. "He kept saying, 'Be patient, let your faith in God be strong, be patient, let your faith in God be strong.' "

She recounted the story calmly. "Then he told me that Yassar had been killed by the Americans in Guantanamo during a brawl over the Koran."

Her son was a young boy, she said. Why didn't the Americans just see what he had to say and release him? Why didn't they at least let her hear his voice on the phone or visit him? "Now all I want is his body back so I can hug him and say goodbye." She picked up a photo of her son in a skullcap and orange jumpsuit, kissed it and put it back down.

In the men's section of the apartment Tuesday, Zharani's father stood greeting the men dressed in the traditional Saudi robes who streamed in to offer condolences. Each kissed him on both cheeks.

"May God grant you patience," they said. "Our prayers are with you." Then they left. As soon as he sat back down, a high-ranking Interior Ministry official returned his call. The father was agitated but very respectful.

"Sir, how can we allow the Americans to conduct the autopsy when they are themselves under suspicion?" he asked. After a few moments of listening, he relaxed and smiled. "Yes, and an independent investigation into the matter by an objective third party." He hung up.

"The Americans can't be both judge and jury in this matter," he said. "We have to have justice."

Seized in Pakistan shortly after the September 11 attacks, as he tried to make his way back to France from an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan where he was "lured ... by a misguided and mistimed sense of adventure,"

Benchellali was released in July 2004.

Along with another five Frenchmen, he awaits trial in France in July on charges of counterfeiting and "associating with criminals in relation to a terrorist enterprise."

The former detainee said he is unable to forget his three-year ordeal with hundreds of other prisoners, most of whom he believes did not commit any hostile act against the United States. "The shared pain endlessly takes me back to the camp."

"I cannot describe in just a few lines the suffering and the torture; but the worst aspect of being at the camp was the despair, the feeling that whatever you say, it will never make a difference," he said.

For some of his fellow prisoners distorted by extremism and full of hatred, Bechellali said, Jihad was "life itself ... But the huge majority of the faces I remember -- the ones that haunt my nights -- are of desperation, suffering, incomprehension turned into silent madness."

Despite his belief that "a small number of the detainees at Guantanamo are guilty of criminal acts," Benchellali said what he heard "from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in my moments of complete despondency, was not, 'Free us, we are innocent!' but 'Judge us for whatever we've done!'

"There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty," he said.

The 460-plus men in Guantánamo Bay have been held for longer than four years. Only 10 have been charged with a crime. Not one has had a trial. The men are not allowed to visit or speak with family or friends. Many have suffered serious abuse. Most are held on the basis of triple and quadruple hearsay, evidence so unreliable that a criminal court would throw it out. Yet the US says it can imprison the men for the rest of their lives. Imagine yourself in this environment, told you will never have the chance to stand up in a court and present your side of the argument. What would you do if no one would listen, if you had been asking for justice for four years and had nothing in return? How hopeless would you become?

Of these three men, little is known. They were in Camp I, a maximum-security area where prisoners are denied even a roll of toilet paper. But we do not know the dead men's stories. While most of the men in Guantánamo have lawyers who fight for their right to a fair trial, these men did not. Until May, the US refused to even tell us who was in Guantánamo. But before it finally released the names of everyone there, the Bush administration secured passage of a law barring lawsuits by the prisoners held in Guantánamo. That means that at last we know the prisoners' identities, but can do nothing legally to help them. The men who committed suicide found themselves in just this legal black hole. They had no legal recourse, just the prospect of a life in prison, in isolation, with no family, no friends, nothing. They took their lives.

So what now? President Bush stated this week that he wants to close Guantánamo, that he wants to give the men trials. Well, let's have them - immediately. The US has had over four years to gather evidence against the men. Surely that is enough time to prove guilt. And now it is time to show the world the evidence. As Harriet Harman, the British constitutional affairs minister, said yesterday, Guantánamo must be opened up to review or shut down. Will Britain do what is necessary to make this a reality? Because this is about even more than the fate of 460 people, it is about whether the US and its allies will lead the world by democratic example, or whether they will continue to give lip service to human rights and open societies, while denigrating those cherished notions with their actions.

If the men in Guantánamo (and the other US prisons around the world, such as the one at the Bagram air force base in Afghanistan, where over 600 men languish in Guantánamo's hidden twin) did something wrong, by all means punish them. But if they did not, they must be sent home.

Mohammed El Gharani, our client at Reprieve, was only 14 when he was seized in a mosque in Pakistan. He was only 15 when he arrived in Guantánamo Bay. Already twice this year he has tried to kill himself, once by hanging, once by slitting his wrists. Let us pray there is movement by the US to finally do justice, before Mohammed, truly only a child, or anyone else in Guantánamo Bay commits suicide.