MANAMA, 24 June 2005 — American lawyers representing Saudi detainees at Guantanamo Bay yesterday urged more Saudi families to join the legal battle for their release amid growing American public support to shut down the Cuba-based facility.

“We are in a critical moment... Americans have begun to realize that Guantanamo Bay is doing more harm than good,” said Bill Newman, a lawyer with Lesser Newman Souweine & Nasser, LLP.

There are 124 Saudis held at the US naval base in Cuba, but there have only been cases filed on behalf of 24 Saudi detainees so far, Newman said after meeting several families yesterday. “We need more (Saudi) families to come forward to us.”

The lawyers’ trip was organized by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, which is overseeing the cases of Gulf nationals who are Guantanamo Bay inmates. Last week lawyers representing six Bahrainis visited families in the Gulf kingdom.

Newman said he would meet Saudi clients at the base for the first time next week. “We are really looking for justice and we will follow this through till the end,” said Tina Foster of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has filed the cases on behalf of all the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

“We need to act now,” she said.

Members of US Congress are now calling for the camp to close amid reports of prisoner abuses there and because the foreign detainees are being held indefinitely with no charges filed.

However, White House officials have said there are no plans to close the facility because the detainees being held there are too dangerous to release while the war on terror continues.

In Geneva, UN human rights experts seeking to visit the base said yesterday they had reliable accounts of torture of the detainees there. The four experts said the United States had not responded to their numerous requests to check on the conditions of terror suspects at the base.

They said their request for a visit was “based on information, from reliable sources, of serious allegations of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees, arbitrary detention, violations of their right to health and their due process rights.” “Many of these allegations have come to light through declassified (US) government documents,” they said.

The experts, who report to UN bodies on different human rights issues, said they had yet to hear back from Washington on their latest request — made in mid-April — to visit the detention facility.

A US spokeswoman said the request was still being reviewed in Washington.

The UN human rights investigators, who have been trying to visit Guantanamo since 2002, sent a new, detailed request to the US government in April requesting an answer by mid-May.

One of the experts, Manfred Nowak of Austria, said at the time that US officials refused to guarantee him the right to speak to detainees in private — an “absolute precondition” for such a visit.

Nowak, the UN special investigator on torture, said his team would need full access to the facilities and the prison population.