Hunching over to stroke his beard with hands shackled to his waist, the scrawny Yemeni was exasperated with the trio of U.S. military officers authenticating that he is held as an enemy of the United States.

"It's not true that I'm an al Qaeda supporter," the 27-year-old war-on-terrorism captive said through an interpreter.

True, he said, he was swept up in a Pakistani police raid on his student guest house in Lahore. Yes, he was living there cost-free with other Yemeni students, thanks to a Muslim missionary group the United States claims is a cover for al Qaeda, called Jama'at al Tabligh.

But he claimed he never had a weapon, never fought in a jihad against America and never set foot in Afghanistan - until Pakistani police delivered him to U.S. forces about three years ago.

This was the scene Saturday for an hour behind the razor wire at Camp Delta, where the Pentagon is still sorting and categorizing the 550 or so captives kept here for interrogation and perhaps future trials.

Systematically since July, the Department of Defense has cranked about 300 of the terrorism suspects through Combatant Status Review Tribunals - administrative hearings by officers, not judges, to reaffirm their "enemy combatant" classification in a bid to placate the Supreme Court. Only one so far has been sent home.

Reporters are being encouraged to act as observers of the portions where a prisoner can plead for his freedom but are banned from naming anyone in the room. And, like the detainees, reporters don't get to see secret files that the military has built on the captives here.

DETAINEES' STORIES

Supervised by a civilian, Navy Secretary Gordon England, the hearings are run by a Navy captain, who, like everyone else in the process, forbids publication of his name. "It just tears your heart out to listen to them, the stories they tell about how they got caught up in this thing," he said. "Whether it's true or not, I don't know."

But more than a third have skipped the hearings altogether, shunning the chance to tell their tales. These include the four prisoners facing war-crimes trials because their defense lawyers were banned from taking part.

Moreover, critics of the U.S. system say the review panels are too little, too late. The Pentagon created a version of the Geneva Conventions' battlefield Article V hearings up to three years after their capture, and critics say the panels are not in the spirit of a June Supreme Court ruling that gave Camp Delta captives the right to judicial review.

"It's less about the facts and more about policy and politics," said New York lawyer Ken Hurwitz of Human Rights First, the new name of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, who was allowed to observe a hearing through a one-way window.

So far, U.S. lawyers have filed about 60 habeas corpus petitions on behalf of detainees here, pressing the federal courts to evaluate the captives on a case-by-case basis or compel the military to let them go home.

SUBSTITUTE

Meantime, the Pentagon has resisted civilian intervention, saying the status review hearings satisfy Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's comment that "an appropriately authorized and properly constituted military tribunal" might be a substitute for the majority's opinion that an enemy combatant must be given a meaningful opportunity to contest his detention.

The Yemeni captive echoed confusion over the administrative hearing during his chance to challenge his detention as he sat in a chair - in beige prison garb with his shackled feet padlocked to the floor, his hands handcuffed to his waist.

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