GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Prison camp staff are making no plans for the lifetime detention of 48 captives the Obama administration has determined will not be released, the admiral in charge of the detention center said Wednesday.

``We go day by day right now,'' Navy Rear Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson said in a wide-ranging interview with eight journalists on the base for a pre-trial hearing in the case of an alleged terrorist trainer. ``We're operating on the Executive Order to close, and that's our guidance. So we haven't addressed that, looked at that.''

Harbeson, just three months on the job as the 10th prison camps commander, described an air of uncertainty at the detention center, where he said President Barack Obama's closure order still governs eight months after the camps were supposed to be emptied.

No member of Congress has visited Guantánamo during the past three months, he said. The Department of Defense is still developing a policy for how to imprison a war criminal whose guilty plea deal included a promise that he'd be imprisoned with his fellow detainees.

Meantime, he said, ``We're prepared'' to shutter the camps once a solution is found on where to put the 174 foreign men currently held at the detention center .

Some have been held here since the camps first opened in January 2002.

Congress has used its purse strings to block Obama administration plans to empty the camps within a year, moving some to detention on U.S. soil and releasing others by Jan. 22.

Instead, the Justice Department has presided over an elaborate review process of each detainee that concluded that 48 of the men can never be tried but are also too dangerous to set free. The Obama administration has said it would like to buy an unused prison in Illinois to house the prisoners, but Congress has not approved the funding.

Harbeson described a tense but mostly compliant prison camp population. He said about 90 percent of the men live in medium-security, communal-style arrangements, eating together, praying together, doing laundry, taking computer classes and watching TV in groups as a reward for following the rules.

The anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he said, passed peacefully. Some of the captives allegedly conspired in the 9/11 attacks, but Harbeson said there were no episodes of them taunting their guards on the anniversary.

Guards, meantime, were reminded that the Muslim holiday Eid al Fitr, which coincided with the anniversary, was a joyful religious occasion.

Harbeson called 9/11 ``a tough emotional time for Americans,'' but said for the captives it just so happened to be ``a very festive time'' celebrated with Pepsi, ice cream and special meals.

In other items, the commander said:

• There is no terminally ill detainee in the camps, where the youngest captive is 24-year-old Omar Khadr of Canada, facing resumption of his terror-murder trial Oct. 18. The oldest is a 62-year-old Pakistani man whose lawyer says he has long suffered a heart condition.

• It would take six to nine months to close up the camps, from transferring the captives elsewhere to dismantling some facilities and mothballing others, once the order was given to do so.

• He was unaware of the last suicide attempt by a captive and estimated the number of hunger strikers in his prison camps at ``less than a dozen.''

• The Pentagon is still developing a policy for how to imprison convicted terrorist Ibrahim al Qosi of Sudan, who pleaded guilty this summer to being a former Taliban mortar man and cook in an al Qaeda bachelor's quarters. He reportedly cut a secret deal to serve just two years at Guantánamo under a plea agreement that let him remain with fellow detainees in a POW-style prison camp rather than be moved to a section that houses the only other convict there -- Osama bin Laden's media secretary, Ali Hamza al Bahlul.