Meals are prepared to strict Islamic standards; signs point the faithful toward Mecca; doctors attend to physical pains, Muslim chaplains to less obvious hurts. But these people who want for little lack something essentially human: a place in the world. For most of the 660 held at Guantanamo Bay, their own countries don’t claim them, and this country doesn’t know what to do with them. Irregular soldiers in a conflict without boundaries or end, we designate them “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war, but that only complicates the legal limbo. They may be among the deadliest enemies the United States faces in the War on Terror, international recruits to al-Qaeda trained and determined to carry out attacks against Americans. Loosing them in unstable Afghanistan is no remedy. But neither is holding them indefinitely without charge—though internment at Guantanamo might be the least they deserve. We just don’t know. And we haven’t been in any hurry to find out.

None of the detainees has been convicted as a terrorist, either before a military tribunal or a civilian court. For almost two years they have been held at the discretion of the executive branch, with no opportunity for a hearing—and critics say these detentions may seriously undermine the rule of law by violating everything from the Constitution to the Geneva Conventions to human rights in general.

Yet the Bush administration insists that it is acting within the law by holding the detainees without trial. In November, however, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal in the case of Rasul v. Bush, a petition for habeas corpus filed on behalf of several of the detainees. If the Court rules in favor of the petitioners, it may ultimately force the administration to change the way it fights the War on Terror.

Part of the reason for holding the detainees at Guantanamo Bay is to prevent them from re-joining the fight in Afghanistan, where most were captured. But Camp Delta, where all but a handful are held, is not a POW camp. It is an interrogation camp: the larger reason for keeping hundreds detained in Guantanamo is to learn everything they know about al-Qaeda and the possible whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or Taliban-leader Mullah Omar.

Some suggest that denying legal counsel to the prisoners plays an important part in the interrogation; they are more readily induced to co-operate while their futures remain uncertain. (None of the detainees knows of the petitions that have been filed on their behalf in federal court.) This ambiguity seems to be having an effect: the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has access to the detainees, claims that many of them have suffered a marked mental deterioration as a result of not knowing how long they will be held. The Pentagon confirms that there have been 32 suicide attempts by 21 inmates at Camp Delta.

The detainees are kept at Guantanamo, rather than at facilities within the United States itself because Guantanamo is not under the jurisdiction of federal courts and the constitutional protections of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments do not extend to the base. This jurisdictional question is at issue in the Rasul v. Bush appeal that the Supreme Court will hear sometime next year. In March, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the no federal court could grant habeas corpus to the petitioners in Rasul because although the United States has full and perpetual control over Guantanamo Bay, ultimate sovereignty still rests with Cuba, from whom the naval station is leased.

If the Supreme Court overturns the appeals court’s decision, the case will simply return to the lower court, which can then rule on the substantive questions involved. But some observers think the Court’s decision to hear the case means the justices are “putting the government on notice” that the detainees should get some kind of individualized hearings, although at least one supporter of the administration’s position, Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that the Court may very well have taken the case in order to affirm the lower-court ruling and put the president’s authority on an even firmer footing.

Although sovereignty over Guantanamo is the immediate issue confronting the Court, the wider implications of the case have attracted considerable interest from some rather surprising groups, including retired U.S. diplomats and military officers and three former American prisoners of war who have filed briefs in support of the detainees. All express concern about how the precedent the U.S. sets in Guantanamo will ultimately affect Americans.

The retired military officers and former POWs in particular fear that American prisoners may be mistreated in other countries if the U.S. does not apply the protections of the Geneva Conventions to the Guantanamo detainees. According to the Third Geneva Convention, even “unlawful combatants”—people who violate the rules of war and do not, for example, wear distinguishing marks on the battlefield—are entitled to hearings before a “competent tribunal” of military officers in cases where there is doubt about their status. If they are confirmed to be unlawful combatants, two options open: they can be tried as war criminals or treated as prisoners of war, who must be released once a conflict ends.

The Department of Defense follows the president’s determination that both the Taliban and al-Qaeda are unlawful combatants. Some supporters of the Pentagon’s position argue in addition that even if tribunals were established to determine each detainee’s status individually, it would do little good. An inmate at Guantanmo could still be held indefinitely even if he were classified as a prisoner of war, so long as hostilities are still ongoing. POW status would only prevent the detainee from being interrogated as thoroughly as he otherwise could be. Serious complications could be expected to arise in trying detainees found to be war criminals as well. “These are not 7-11 robberies,” notes Ruth Wedgwood, “some of the problems you have with [alleged 20th 9/11 hijacker Zacharias] Moussaoui in district court will also exist in [war-crimes] tribunals. What do you do if the detainee wants to talk to every other detainee in Guantanamo?”

The difficulty involved in trying to apply the Geneva Conventions to Guantanamo has prompted some legal scholars to consider the need for a new judicial framework for the unprecedented War on Terror. “They’re trying to shoehorn a very different kind of circumstance into the Geneva Conventions,” according to Michael O’Neill, a law professor at George Mason University who believes that the conventions, drafted after World War II to address conflicts between standing armies and nation-states, are ill-suited to deal with transnational terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda.

Although both conservatives like O’Neill and liberal experts like the University of Chicago’s Ronald Dworkin have suggested the need for new rules, there has so far been no consensus on what such rules might be or who would draft them. Dworkin, who contends that the administration should hew as close to the Geneva Conventions as possible until something more specific can be drafted, does have some concrete proposals; for one thing, he calls on Congress to set legislative limits on how long prisoners can be held as “enemy combatants” in the open-ended War on Terror.

There are others, however, who think that the Geneva Conventions are still, for the most part, sufficient. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group that is representing the petitioners in Rasul v. Bush, says, “I’m more traditional on this and I would hesitate to want to see a new set of laws cut to the framework, to the particular situation. The end of hostilities to me means traditional wars. Those people picked up in Afghanistan get released at the end of the Afghanistan war, those people picked up in Iraq at the end of the Iraq war. As to others ... if you’re part of a criminal conspiracy to do harm to the United States, you should be tried for that.” Far from advocating new rules for the War on Terror, Ratner believes that the principle at stake in Guantanamo is a very old one indeed. “It’s an 800 year old tradition since the Magna Charta that you should get some kind of a right of review,” he says.

If the people being held at Camp Delta are indeed, as some officials have described them, among “the worst of the worst,” Americans might well have no qualms about denying them habeas corpus. There are some indications, however, that not everyone who has been held at Guantanamo is so dangerous. Lt. Col. Bill Cline, the deputy commander of Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees were held, told the New York Times in March 2002 that some of them might be innocent “victims of circumstance” caught up in the chaos of Afghanistan. And indeed, some 64 detainees have since been released without being charged. Four of them were turned over to the authorities in their own countries to face justice, but the rest have gone free.

That some prisoners have been released has multiple interpretations. Were they innocent bystanders caught in a large dragnet or, as seems more likely, Taliban fighters who had co-operated fully with their interrogators and were deemed not to present a continuing threat to the United States? One reading of the releases suggests that the military’s own procedures for determining how dangerous inmates are, even in the absence of formal tribunals, works quite well. According to Pentagon spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers, “The three things we look at before releasing detainees [are] that they are no longer a threat to the United States, that there’s no security issues there, that they are not guilty of any violations of the rules of war that would cause them to be a candidate for a military commission, and that there’s no intelligence value to come out of them.” Ruth Wedgwood argues that the Defense Department has every incentive to want to identify the detainees and release those who do not pose a threat. “It’s intensely in DOD’s interest to know who they have and know what they did,” she says.

But there are other reasons Americans should worry about what happens in Guantanamo Bay beyond just the possibility that a few of the detainees may be innocent. In launching their terror war, al-Qaeda and its allies deliberately set out to blur traditional wartime distinctions between civilians and soldiers and between lawful and unlawful combatants. This poses a considerable challenge to American notions of justice, as seen in the controversy surrounding the detainees at Guantanamo. They are not sympathetic figures, but how the United States deals with them is an important test of how well we can balance security concerns with the rule of law. Thus the legal battle over these 660 souls now caught in legal purgatory could become one of the defining engagements in the war on terrorism.