His remarks will be welcomed by human rights campaigners who claim they are being held illegally.
Johan Steyn, the third most senior judge in Britain, arrived this evening to give his speech in central London.
He's fired up alright -- and not just over Guantanamo Bay. He describes the US bombardment of Afghanistan as a military success - but it's left the region ravaged with warlords expanding their opium production for the world market.
But he doesn't stop there. Seconds later he's onto Iraq saying the shock and awe was deeply unpopular and fractured the carefully crafted international order of things -- easy to wreck -- more difficult to reconstruct.
He comes within a hair's breadth of saying America is torturing prisoners -- using techniques honed at their Bagram Base in Afghanistan.
At Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, he says there's sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to stand for hours on end - what he terms minute cells 1.8m by 2.4m then quotes officials saying it's 'not quite torture but as close as you can get.’
He said: "The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was and is to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts, and at the mercy of victors.
“The procedural rules do not prohibit the use of force to coerce prisoners to confess."
Lord Justice Steyn says there's no justice -- Presidential order denies US courts hearing complaints of torture - or that prisoners might be non-combatants -- or foot soldiers who know nothing of al Qaeda.
"The blanket presidential order deprives them all of any rights whatsoever. As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice.”
The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with the minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials. The answer can be given quite shortly: It is a resounding No."
Concluding, Lord Steyn says the deal whereby British prisoners at Camp Delta will escape the death penalty is morally indefensible.
When George Bush met Tony Blair in London there was no sign of a solution to the Guantanamo problem. The judge says the Government's stance of continually saying it's working hard behind the scenes just won't wash anymore.
"It may be appropriate to pose a question: Ought our government to make plain publicly and unambiguously our condemnation of the utter lawlessness at Guantanamo Bay?"
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