The photographs show the prisoners, possibly Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters, shackled, arms bound, wearing black cloth hoods and seated inside a C-130 cargo plane decorated with a large American flag. The pictures were sent by anonymous e-mail to the Web site of U.S. radio talk-show host Art Bell.

The Pentagon said the pictures had not been authorized and it was investigating how they became public. The photos are the first to show the methods used for transferring prisoners around Afghanistan and to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

They earned immediate condemnation from human-rights organizations while military experts said the measures taken by the U.S. soldiers appeared excessive.

Prisoners must of course be searched and disarmed, said Michel Drapeau, a retired colonel in the Canadian army. "While in closed custody you want to make sure that the enemy is restrained to the degree required to ensure both his safety and the safety of his captors, and to prevent his escape or his capacity to inflict harm or injury on anyone," he said.

But the photos show steps taken to intimidate and humiliate the prisoners, he said, and the contrast between the heavily armed soldiers and their cowed and scruffy charges looks like overkill. "Even people very, very sympathetic to the U.S. such as myself would say, 'Come on. Where could they possibly go?' "

Neither the United States nor Canada would want to see its citizens treated in this manner by a foreign government, he said, even if detained on criminal charges. The U.S. Defense Department has prohibited news media from photographing any part of the prisoner transfer operation and severely limited media access to the detention center in Guantanamo Bay.

"We have very, very tight restrictions on any images of the detainees for security purposes and because we have no interest in potentially holding detainees up for any kind of public ridicule," Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke told a press conference yesterday.

But that explanation did not carry much weight with human-rights groups.

"We have all along raised concerns that when individuals are being detained and transferred, in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo, that they be treated in accordance with international standards, which among other things prohibit torture and ill-treatment," said Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada. Sensory deprivation, including extended periods under a hood, is considered ill treatment and possibly even as a form of torture, he said.

Meanwhile yesterday, U.S. officials said that one of five men killed in a CIA hit on al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen Sunday was a U.S. citizen named Ahmed Hijazi linked to members of the alleged al-Qaeda cell in suburban Buffalo. Authorities had said two members of the cell remained at large.

© 2002 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc

###