The Obama administration's task force has cleared a third of the Guantánamo detainees for release, and the military has posted notices in the camps in a bid to signal that, for some war-on-terror captives, an end of their days in Cuba may be on the horizon.

In all, 78 detainees have been cleared, according to the notice that circulated in the prison camps last week. It did not name the detainees among them who could leave after diplomatic arrangements are made and instead broke the number down by nationalities.

Over the weekend, the Obama administrated sent two Uzbeks for resettlement in Ireland and returned a Yemeni to his homeland in compliance with a judge's order.

That left 223 detainees at Guantánamo, 75 now cleared to go.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, a Guantánamo spokesman, said staff began circulating the notice in September as part of a new information campaign tracking for detainees the progress of the review.

An earlier initiative had guards post multilingual copies of President Barak Obama's Jan. 22 executive order in detention center recreation areas announcing a one-year time frame for closure, a deadline the Obama administration now says it may not meet.

``We're not focused on whether or not the deadline will or won't be met on a particular day,'' White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday. ``We're focused on ensuring that the facility is closed and . . . to make the most progress that we can that's possible.''

Yemenis amount for the largest single block cleared for release -- 27 -- which should come as no surprise because about 40 percent of the detainees are citizens of Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland.

U.S. diplomats and their Yemen counterparts have so far failed to reach an overarching repatriation agreement on security guarantees for the men who had been held for years at the detention center in southeast Cuba, nearly all without charge.

A Yemeni Embassy statement issued in Washington over the weekend said it ``welcomes with enthusiasm'' the single release and transfer of a citizen, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. It vowed to ``continue its diplomatic dialogue'' with the U.S. government ``to repatriate the remaining Yemeni detainees.''

Another large block cleared for release include 13 citizens of China, members of the Uighur Muslim minority, some of whom are likely to be resettled in the Pacific island nation of Palau.

The remaining cleared detainees on the list broke down this way:

Nine Tunisians, seven Algerians, four Syrians, four Uzbeks, three Libyans, three Saudis, two Egyptians, two West Bank Palestinians, two Kuwaitis, an Azerbaijani and a Tajik.

Two Syrians went to Portugal in late August, presumably among the four on the list, under an Obama administration plea to the European Union to get third-country resettlement for detainees who might face torture in their native countries.

Even before the closure order, State Department officials had concluded that some detainees from North Africa could not be repatriated once free because they had earlier fled their nations as devout Muslims for religious freedoms.

Others have argued that the stigma of Guantánamo meant they would face persecution.