GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Even as the Obama administration has dropped the term ''enemy combatant'' in reshaping its war-on-terror policy, the Pentagon is inviting lawyers to apply for jobs defending its detention of 200-plus captives at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A Pentagon official circulated a ''help wanted'' ad through the American Bar Association this month, offering between $39,407 and $130,211 a year for qualified lawyers to help answer habeas corpus petitions in the federal courts.

''Attorneys with any litigation experience are encouraged to apply,'' said the job posting, offering three-year positions. ``These positions are located in the Washington, D.C. area, with the potential for some travel to Guantánamo Bay.''

Curiously, the Justice Department -- not the Defense Department -- has for years been in charge of defending each captive's detention at the U.S. District Court in Washington.

Individual captives' cases are coming up before different federal judges, who are weighing whether the Pentagon has enough evidence to hold them as war prisoners. The lawsuits, called habeas corpus petitions, originally accused President Bush of detaining them illegally.

Since the inauguration, the court has been substituting President Barack Obama's name for Bush's.

In parallel, President Obama has ordered the prison camps at this remote base in southeast Cuba emptied by Jan. 23.

He assigned Attorney General Eric Holder to sort out the Guantánamo captives' files to decide who among them can be prosecuted for crimes and who should be released or sent to other countries.

The help-wanted ad says the Office of the General Counsel seeks applicants willing to ``start immediately.''

But Pentagon spokesman Cynthia Smith said Friday in response to a query by The Miami Herald that there were no actual openings.

Smith said the Defense Department has been advertising the job offers since this summer, before Obama took office, and the Office of General Counsel has an active advertisement to amass résumés ``to address any future hiring requirements, including to replace any departing attorneys.''

She would say only that a Pentagon lawyer who asked the American Bar Association to circulate the still-active job postings did this ``without authorization.''

The lawyer, Andrew Borene, did not respond to several inquires from The Herald.

Guantánamo detention policy has been a growth industry for attorneys in both government and beyond.

Hundreds of lawyers from firms across the nation have for years been helping detainees file habeas corpus petitions in the federal courts, with the Center for Constitutional Rights tracking the caseload and taking on a good chunk of the cases.

Much of the work as been pro bono, notably the series of three war-on-terror detainee rights challenges that made it to U.S. Supreme Court, which in each instance ruled against the Bush administration.

Government lawyers have described the habeas work as voluminous, and unsuccessfully argued in an effort to stop them wholesale that they were hindering the war effort by jamming the docket at the U.S. District Court in Constitution Avenue.

Federal judges have already ruled that about two dozen of the roughly 800 detainees who have been held at Guantánamo were unlawfully detained. Currently, the United States holds about 241 there -- 19 of whom have won their cases and are awaiting third-country resettlement.

Former acting Pentagon General Counsel Daniel Dell'Orto notified the court in an August affidavit that the Defense Department was hiring 40 attorneys to help on the cases, and then had approximately 30 lawyers in his division working ``exclusively on habeas corpus litigation.''

Over the years, the Justice and Defense departments have created entire units to defend the policy -- as well as the new special war court championed by the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists by military commissions.

The commissions are on hold at least until May 20, at Obama's request, while a Cabinet-level team decides what to do about potential prosecutions.

Meantime, the war court prosecutor's office has reinforced its ranks -- there are now 63 military commissions prosecutors, up from 61 in December -- in case the Pentagon gets to prosecute the accused Sept. 11 co-conspirators and other alleged war criminals, rather than the federal court prosecutions the president has said he preferred.

The ad caused a stir in national legal circles because the Pentagon appeared to be pouring new resources into its defense of detainee policy even as it is under review.

Pentagon lawyers working on habeas cases have generally been assigned to dig out and examine evidence that might justify the detentions of the Guantánamo captives, most of whom have been held for seven years without charge.

But attorney David Remes, who has sought release of about a dozen Yemenis at Guantánamo, said that despite the additional jobs the Pentagon had not made ``any meaningful effort to locate or produce exculpatory evidence.''