WASHINGTON -- Long before U.S. troops took him in shackles to Guantánamo Bay, Libyan exile Omar Deghayes got a law degree in London. He lost part of his sight, at age 4, to childhood swordplay.

He says his family fled their homeland for Europe in 1986 because his father was killed for opposing Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi. He says he admires Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.

Deghayes, 34, is also one of the "worst of the worst" - an enemy combatant - now suing President Bush and the Pentagon to charge him or set him free from Camp Delta.

And, like dozens more so-called terror suspects, he is using the U.S. District Court here to systematically do something the Bush administration has fought for three years: He is telling his side of the story.

Far from the razor wire, inside the court that ordered Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, the stories of the once nameless, faceless men kept captive at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba come alive in page after page of habeas corpus petitions for 140 Guantánamo captives from 23 countries from China to Saudi Arabia.

They include assertions of being kidnapped to Afghanistan so the United States could cast them as captured on the battlefield. They write of wives and children awaiting their return and complain about their conditions, medical care and isolation.

Some allege American interrogations turned to torture. Others says they are innocent, devout Muslims mistaken for Islamic militants.

WAR POWERS

Bush administration lawyers have systematically fought the lawsuits, using the president's war powers to justify keeping scrutiny of Guantánamo's detainees outside the courts.

They argue the petitioners are terrorists whose interrogations have yielded valuable intelligence in the hunt for al Qaeda cells and the war to topple the Taliban. Commanders say they comply with a presidential order to treat the detainees humanely, and interrogations are strictly monitored.

Former captive Mamdouh Habib, 46, went home to Australia in January. But in his lawsuit, he argued that U.S. forces outsourced his case to Egypt, where interrogators used electric shock and water torture to force from him a false confession - that he knew some Sept. 11 hijackers.

Captive Abdulla al-Anazi sued in February. But little else is known about him - except that he is a double amputee who presumably lost both legs in battle and has 24 brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia.

And there's Fahmi Abdulla Ahmed, in his 20s, the son of a Yemeni air force colonel who asserts he was captured by Pakistani police and handed over to Americans in Afghanistan. His lawyer, Adrian Stewart, describes him as a "shrimpy guy with black teeth" who says that U.S. troops humiliated him by shaving off his eyebrows and head hair - for a cross-shaped buzz-cut.

HIGH COURT RULING

The prisoners' lawsuits have been stacking up since June, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that foreigners held in U.S.-controlled Cuban territory can contest their captivity in federal courts.

As a body, the petitions are a "step by step" effort to "reestablish the rule of law and the principle that even the president is not above the law, " says attorney Michael Ratner of New York's Center for Constitutional Rights, which has championed the effort.

An outspoken critic of the Guantánamo prison, Ratner said the lawsuits illustrate a government power gone awry: "Not only has this wrong-headed effort harmed the detainees, but it has undermined critical legal protections."

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