GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- The Pentagon plunged forward Wednesday with pretrial hearings against eight detainees in its beleaguered war court system with challenges to both the ongoing terror prosecutions and their remote state-of-the-art technology.

''Hopefully, this is going to get better,'' Navy Cmdr. Dirk Padgett said as court staff complained they couldn't hear him introduce himself as a prosecutor in the case of Ibrahim Qosi inside the $12 million expeditionary legal compound.

Qosi, 49, allegedly served as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and sometime driver, as well as on an al Qaeda mortar crew in Afghanistan. Military prosecutors sought to delay the case while the Obama administration reviews how to proceed.

The Sudanese captive's military lawyers struck a contrarian's note by arguing for a speedy trial in the case, invoking a ''justice-delayed, justice-denied'' argument on the grounds Qosi was among the first men taken to the prison camps when they opened in January 2002. Obama has ordered the prison camps emptied by Jan. 22.

''He was one of the guys who was kept in the dog cages. Talk about oppressive confinement,'' argued Navy Lt. Cmdr. Travis Owens, Qosi's Pentagon-paid defense lawyer.

The hearings were expected to continue later Wednesday in the case of Canadian captive Omar Khadr, who fired all of his U.S. military lawyers but one after they squabbled over defense strategy.

On Thursday, five men accused as 9/11 co-conspirators will appear in court on how to decide whether two of the men are sane enough to proceed to an eventual death penalty trial.

President Barack Obama has frozen the commissions themselves to give his lawyers time to decide in what venue, if anywhere, to put select Guantánamo detainees on trial. He has said he prefers civilian prosecutions.

The Pentagon's chief war crimes prosecutor, Navy Capt. John Murphy, told reporters on the eve of the hearings that prosecutors are moving forward incrementally on issues that don't change the status quo in cases, even as Obama attorneys adjust court rules to benefit the accused.

He also said the war crimes prosecutor was preparing ''about 66 cases,'' none approved by an Obama task force sorting through Guantánamo case files.

But mostly this week's session illustrated the uncertainty of the moment as Pentagon staff struggled over what should take place, if anything, at the crude compound called Camp Justice on an abandoned airstrip overlooking Guantánamo Bay.

The Pentagon brought in more than 160 lawyers, administrators, observers and reporters aboard a charter flight on Tuesday morning and then turned on the lights in the war court, which has been dark since Khadr fired his lawyers six weeks ago.

After landing, escorts forgot to have the families of Sept. 11 victims file off the aircraft last, a practice that has permitted military and civilian photographers to document their arrival.

A Pentagon escort then offered to put the nine parents and children of World Trade Center and Flight 77 victims back aboard the charter, and have them climb down the steps again. The media declined.

The idea was floated but not formally offered to the visiting media, said Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon, who added he would not have permitted the victims to be used in that manner, even had the journalists accepted the offer.

Later, two lawyers didn't make the hearings, testing the reach of Camp Justice's video-conferencing capabilities.

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