'FURTHER IN'

Yale Law School professor Harold Koh, who represented Cuban and Haitian migrants at the Guantanamo base in 1994-95, said by phone that the construction means "we are just getting further and further in" to an alternative justice system outside the rule of law and unauthorized by Congress.

"If everyone thought about where this is leading us, they might have doubts about whether this is where we want to go," Koh said. "We have set up an offshore prison camp in an extrajudicial zone where people have no rights, and we assume no one is going to follow our lead . . . . "

For example, he noted, Indonesia is now building an island detention camp for alleged rebels.

TREATY REQUIREMENTS

The Bush administration says al Qaeda and the Taliban broke the laws of war and so none qualify as prisoners of war. It did not first grant each detainee a hearing, as one of the Geneva Conventions requires "should any doubt arise" about status.

Ratified in 1955 and invoked in the War Crimes Act of 1996, the international treaty is also U.S. law. It says POWs cannot be prosecuted for having attacked enemy soldiers and, in war-crime trials, are entitled to the same procedures their captors would receive - a court-martial with appeals to independent civilian judges.

The rules announced for "enemy combatants" trials provide no combat immunity, and appeals stay within the military chain of command.

President Bush has named six detainees eligible for trial. None has been charged.

Should the military commission trials go forward, those at Guantanamo would take place in a former control tower once slated for demolition. Its airstrip was left unusably pitted by tents during the last rafter crisis.

Formerly known as "the Pink Palace," the humble headquarters annex has been repainted yellow in anticipation of intense global scrutiny.

Its windows are blocked, but Smith said the inside has a traditional layout and cherrywood furniture. There has been no order to build an execution chamber, Miller said.

Across the bay, a new media center with 22 Internet ports and two plasma television sets is nearly complete. Smith said that a pool of reporters would be allowed into the commission chamber and that others would watch via closed-circuit TV.

The base can house 174 visiting reporters, diplomats, officials and others in the event of trials. But the numbers may not be swelled much by civilian defense attorneys, who can volunteer to assist the assigned military defense counsel at their own expense.

ATTORNEYS' CONCERNS

The National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys has said it would be "unethical" to appear under rules that allow monitoring of attorneys' conversations with clients and retrials for acquitted defendants.

The American Bar Association has also expressed reservations, singling out a rule that bars civilian lawyers from seeing classified evidence even though they are required to obtain top-secret clearance.

Left unanswered is what will become of those against whom there is insufficient evidence for trial but who may be deemed too dangerous to free.

"It's a tough spot - and a totally unnecessary one, which is what's so excruciating," said Ken Hurwitz of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

He said that if the United States were to use long-standing legal procedures for handling POWs and trying war criminals, it would not be accused of acting with arbitrary lawlessness.

Smith said that such judgments are premature. He listed the ways in which commission rules parallel those of traditional trials - presumption of innocence, a prosecutor's burden to prove a charge beyond a reasonable doubt, a defense attorney, and the right to remain silent.

"It's very easy to be critical of a process when it's new and you haven't seen it in action yet," Smith said. "I think at the end of the day, people will say the accused had his day in court."