South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, a Republican, former military prosecutor and champion of war crimes trials, put in a pitch for using the U.S. Navy base, saying ''the courtroom at Guantánamo Bay is uniquely set up'' to hold these trials.

But later in the hearing he appeared to contradict himself by endorsing closing the prison camps as a way of getting a fresh start with world opinion.

Obama has set a Jan. 22 deadline for closure and lawyers on all sides agreed that few of the trials could be completed by then -- especially because Congress is still debating changes to the commissions' formula.

After adoption, the judges and lawyers would then have to figure out the application to any pretrial activities, such as those to be carried out next week.

Pentagon prosecutors -- advocates for the war court -- have invited the parents of a young stockbroker killed in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, to watch the proceedings.

Still to be decided by challenges at the trials is what constitutional rights a foreign captive held by the military might invoke, whether or not the trial is held on U.S. soil or perhaps a military base elsewhere.

Both Kris and Johnson said they imagined certain ''due process'' protections would apply.

Republican Sen. John McCain, the former Vietnam War POW and an architect of the military commissions law, said he wrote commissions law to give captives Geneva Conventions protections against torture not ``the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens.''

The Navy's top uniformed lawyer, Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, told the senators that military judges are already grappling with the fundamental due process issue of how to evaluate battlefield evidence that doesn't follow the traditional law enforcement model that requires a Miranda warning.

He cited the example of a confession ''taken at the point of a rifle when a soldier goes in and breaks down the door, and takes a statement from a detainee'' in an ''inherently coercive environment'' -- and urged the senators to write guidelines for military judges to consider on how to evaluate whether to admit the captive's confession at trial.

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