Even as federal judges weigh whether the U.S. has the authority to detain and try suspects in the war on terror, the Pentagon is quietly planning for permanency at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, The Herald has learned.

Pentagon planners are now seeking $25 million to build a state-of-the-art 200-cell concrete building meant to eventually replace the rows of rugged cells fashioned from shipping containers at Camp Delta.

At the same time, the Army is creating a full-time, professional guard force - a 324-member Military Police Internment and Resettlement Battalion that will replace a temporary, mostly reserve force at Guantánamo.

A Department of Army memorandum to Congress obtained by The Herald envisions the new military police force being included in the 2005 and 2006 budgets. "This action is part of a systematic process to enhance Army's capabilities required to defend the Nation's interests at home and abroad, " says the undated memo from the Army's legislative liaison office.

It gave two key dates: Oct. 16, 2004, to activate the battalion headquarters and its first company, and Oct. 16, 2005, to activate another company.

Not all 20 officers and 304 enlisted soldiers have been activated, said Army Col. David McWilliams of the Southern Command. But an advance team is already at the base preparing to take up guard duties in the spring, he said.

A second Army memo to answer congressional queries about the new unit says it "doctrinally supports a sensitive operational requirement" and "helps to mitigate the high operational tempo of the military police force."

Aside from the Marine force that set up the prison nearly three years ago, many troops who guarded captives in Guantánamo have been Army reservists mobilized from civilian law enforcement duties in the Midwest.

550 CAPTIVES

The prison today has about 550 captives from 42 nations who have been brought to Cuba from Afghanistan, the first front in the war against terrorism. Only four have been charged with crimes, a trial process now stalled in federal courts.

On Nov. 8, U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington, D.C., ruled unconstitutional a Military Commission's war crimes trial for Osama bin Laden driver Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34, of Yemen. The Pentagon then suspended all war crimes trials while the Justice Department appealed his decision.

Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green is deciding on habeas corpus petitions brought by civilian lawyers for 53 prisoners alleging they are illegally detained. "They're betting that the courts are going to, in the end, find for the government, that they can keep these enemy combatants, as they label them, indefinitely, as long as they have some kind of an annual review process, " said retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a Vietnam veteran who is now a senior military affairs fellow at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker lobby.

"So Guantánamo becomes an extra-territorial - I don't want to say gulag - a prison for anyone we want to put down there and label an unlawful enemy combatant, " Smith said.

Bush administration officials describe any possible judicial proceedings there as secondary to the prison's main purpose of holding and interrogating suspects for intelligence on how al Qaeda works. Commanders describe the guards' work there as at times humiliating and testing soldiers' patience because some captives have spewed insults and spit on guards.

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