NEW YORK (AFP) - The United States should shut down its offshore prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, The New York Times said in an editorial published Saturday.

"Who needs sophomoric cartoons to inflame the Muslim world when you've got the Bush administration's prison system? One reason the White House is so helpless against the violence spawned by those Danish cartoons is that it has squandered so much of its moral standing at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib," the Times editorial said.

"Now the only solution is to close Guantanamo Bay and account for its prisoners fairly and openly. The United States then needs a prisons policy that conforms to the law and to democratic principles," the Times added.

It noted that President Georgew W. Bush argued that a permanent state of war, in his view, justifies the camp.

Yet "that is exactly the problem: by creating Guantanamo outside the legal system for prisoners who, according to Mr. Bush, have no rights, the United States is stuck holding these 500 men in perpetuity," the editorial said. "The handful who may be guilty of heinous crimes can never be tried in a real court because of their illegal detentions. A vast majority did nothing or were guilty only of fighting on a battlefield, but the administration refuses to sort them out."

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday that "sooner or later" Guantanamo will have to be closed, while British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in Berlin on Friday that the camp was "an anomaly" which needed resolving.

The White House has rejected calls for the camp's closure and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday that Annan was "flat wrong" to call for its closure.

The base itself has been a point of contention for decades.

The United States maintains the camp on a naval base which it says it rents from Cuba. Havana, which returns the payment, says the base is occupied against its will.