On Friday, the Pentagon notified Feinstein, according to her office, that ``it has canceled the contract solicitation and will examine alternatives.''

The Pentagon on Saturday gave no details but suggested it would no longer seek to fund the Guantánamo project without explicit congressional appropriation and authorization.

''We continue to work with Congress to proceed in an expeditious fashion to bring these unlawful combatants to justice,'' said Air Force Lt. Col. Todd Vician, th Pentagon's weekend spokesman.

But as of Saturday, the fast-track bid solicitation was still on a U.S. government contracting website, with a Dec. 20 deadline for solicitations and a July 2007 completion date. The Pentagon previously built a more modest, single-court complex at the Navy base for earlier Military Commissions, which the U.S. Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in June.

Feinstein's office credited the about-face to ``concerns she and others had raised about the proposed location and funding mechanism.''

Pentagon officials are now preparing new rules for presumably constitutional trials, under the 2006 Military Commissions Act, although lawyers for detainees are already challenging portions of the law in the federal courts.

Disclosure of the solicitation last month unleashed a wave of criticism.

California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, outgoing chairman of the House Armed Service Committee, declared the project ill-advised.

New York Republican Rep. James Walsh, outgoing chairman of the military appropriations subcommittee, in comments in the Syracuse Post-Standard, expressed concern about its impact on military readiness.

''We're at war,'' he said. ``It sounds like their priorities are skewed.''

`BACK-ROOM STUNT?'

And Democratic New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who has served on the Armed Services Committee, called the proposal a 'back-room stunt, of secretly taking money away from veterans' care and soldiers' facilities.''

Outside of Congress, Amnesty International labeled it a ''white elephant'' and a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial scorned it as a ``kangaroo compound.''

The American Civil Liberties Union wrote members in an e-mail alert that Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton, had attended Defense Department planning conferences on the project.

Halliburton spokeswoman Melissa Norcross last week would not say whether a subsidiary already working at Guantánamo, would bid to build the legal compound.

Pentagon spokesmen would not say how rarely, if ever, the Bush administration had used emergency authority to circumvent Congress' power to appropriate and authorize.

Although Congress had no power to halt construction under the Pentagon's emergency authority, the Pentagon's England had sought a commitment from key Congress members to restore the money it intended to divert from existing, authorized military construction projects.

Pentagon spokesmen would not identify which already appropriated projects it would set aside.