BY EARLY morning the damp heat was already rising around the courthouse, a drab, low building topped with radio masts high above Guantanamo Bay. Inside, everyone waited in silence: Captain Daniel O’Toole, of the US Navy, the “presiding officer”, wearing black robes and taking the place of a judge, and the defence and prosecution in the formal dress uniforms of the US Army, Navy and Air Force.

Then the doors opened to reveal the defendant, Jabran Said bin al-Qahtani, a slight figure with wild black hair and 4in beard, a head shorter than the military police holding his arms. He was dressed in a tan tunic and cropped trousers, the uniform of the “medium-compliant detainee” at Guantanamo, America’s detention camp for its captives in the War on Terror, on the southeastern fringe of Cuba.

He had evidently rejected the armfuls of blazers and slacks that Lieutenant-Colonel Bryan Broyles, his Pentagon-appointed lawyer, had tentatively picked out for him at the Navy Exchange superstore.

“I don’t want this court,” he said in Arabic, the mild, sing-song tone of the female translator jarring with his own. “You judge and you sentence me the way you want if this is Allah’s will. A nation that is an enemy of Allah cannot be a leader.”

He then rejected Colonel Broyles as his lawyer and left the court, refusing to return.

Mr al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen whom Colonel Broyles believes is 26 or 27, is one of only ten Guantanamo “detainees” to be charged with a crime in the four years since the camp opened.

His appearance on Tuesday was the first chance for observers to hear him speak.

At least 760 men and boys have passed through the c observers calculate that 493 remain. None has yet been brought to trial. But since January, the court has been working through pre-trial hearings for those charged, which lay the ground for the “military commissions”, the special tribunals that President Bush has created to try the “detainees”. The US Government maintains that the captives are not conventional prisoners of war, subject to the Geneva Conventions, but are “unlawful combatants”.

This week Colonel Moe Davis, the chief prosecutor, said that two dozen more might soon be charged, and that the Government might ask for the death penalty for some.

But the Department of Defence also said that it had listed 141 more detainees for release or transfer to their own countries, as it does not plan to charge them or try to extract more intelligence. It has already released or transferred 267. The final four British citizens at the camp were sent back to Britain in January last year, where they were freed without charge. Nine long-term residents of Britain remain at the camp, according to Amnesty International; some are applying for citizenship.

In January 2002 Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, called the detainees “among the most dangerous, best-trained vicious killers on the face of the Earth”. But critics of the military commissions — who include, on fundamental points, the Pentagon defence lawyers — argue that the US does not have enough evidence of serious crimes. “If these really were the worst of the worst, as Mr Rumsfeld says, you’d think that someone other than Osama bin Laden’s driver would have showed up by now,” Colonel Broyles said (referring to Salim Ahmed Hamdan, one of those charged).

This week’s hearings have brought three detainees to court: Mr al-Qahtani, Sufyian Barhoumi, an Algerian, and Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi, another Saudi. They were allegedly captured by Pakistani forces in a guest house in Faisalabad on March 28, 2002, with Abu Zubaida, who is said to be an al-Qaeda mastermind. US forces took the three to Guantanamo and Abu Zubaida to an undisclosed destination.

The three are charged with conspiracy. The US alleges that Mr Barhoumi trained Mr al-Qahtani and Mr al-Sharbi in making improvised explosive devices (roadside bombs) to attack US forces in Afghanistan. Lawyers for all three reject the charges, on the ground (among others) that conspiracy does not represent a crime under international laws of war. According to Colonel Broyles: “The US has no business treating him (Mr al-Qahtani) as anything other than a prisoner of war, or releasing him to civilian authorities to be tried in civilian courts.”

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