President Bush said today that he would like to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp on Cuba, but for the fact that some of the terror suspects held there were too "darned dangerous" to release.

Speaking at a press conference in the White House Rose Garden the day after returning from a surprise trip to Baghdad, Mr Bush said that he realised the detention centre was an "excuse" for critics to claim that American was guilty of hypocrisy over its core values.

"I’d like to close Guantanamo," Mr Bush said. "But I also recognise that we’re holding some people that are darned dangerous, and that we’d better have a plan to deal with them in our courts.

"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 (to) encourage other countries to adhere to.’

"My answer to them is, is that we are a nation of laws. Eventually, these people will have trials and they will have counsel and they will be represented in a court of law."

Mr Bush's comments come three days after guards at Guantanamo found three inmates - two Saudis and a Yemeni - hanged in their cells. US officials at first dismissed the simultaneous suicides as "a good PR move" and an "act of asymmetric warfare", although later a more humanitarian gloss was put on the deaths.

Mr Bush said that the best way to handle Guantanamo detainees, many picked off the battlefields of Afghanistan as suspected Taleban or al-Qaeda operatives, was through military courts. His administration was waiting for the US Supreme Court to make a decision in a case in which a US federal court ruled a detainee was being held at Guantanamo in contravention of US law and the constitution, he said.

European governments, the UN and various human rights groups have castigated the Bush administration over the camp at a US naval base on Cuba, saying that holding inmates as"enemy combatants" without trial, charges, or any prospect of release is cruel and unlawful.

In response to the suicides, five UN experts who monitor the camp for the UN human rights body, renewed their call for the camp to be shut down.

"The simultaneous suicide of three detainees in the Guantanamo military base on June 10 was to a certain extent foreseeable in light of the harsh and prolonged conditions of their detention, and reinforces the need for the urgent closure of the detention centre," they said.

At present 460 people are held at Guantanamo as "enemy combatants". In total, only ten have been formally charged since the camp opened in early 2002. Washington does not acknowledge that they are prisoners of war or entitled to the full protection of the Geneva Conventions.

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