GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, CUBA -- The Pentagon on Monday begins more hearings for the proposed death penalty trial of reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, even as President-elect Barack Obama's transition team and the Bush administration work to possibly close the Navy base prison camps.

The controversial prison camps can be closed, as Obama promised during the campaign, but military and legal experts say any exit strategy will require some key decisions.

An Obama transition team last month began meetings at the Pentagon and consulting with its own experts in pursuit of an endgame.

To empty the camps, the team must decide whether to move 250 war-on-terror detainees at Guantánamo all at once and to where, as well as how to try those accused of crimes and whether to scrap the military commissions.

On Sunday the Pentagon airlifted 50 reporters to Guantánamo to watch the proceedings, for the first time. Also on board were the parents of some of the Sept. 11 dead, killed after hijackers slammed jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

One architect of detention policy said the war court's days are numbered. ''I have no doubt that military commissions in their present form are going away. Gone,'' said Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, who ran detainee affairs for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ``These commissions will not outlast the Bush administration. End of discussion.''

WHERE DO THEY GO?

But where to move the captives and how soon? Decision-makers must figure out whether to put them in one place or several, at another base, like Fort Leavenworth, or in federal jails.

Moreover, it's not simple to move men held for years as presumed, fanatical America haters.

The Pentagon brought the men to Cuba -- and 500 others, since freed -- between 2002 and 2006.

One proposal is to turn to the federal courts, spread those who are prosecutable around the nation and have U.S. attorneys build new cases or prosecute old ones.

Mohammed is already under indictment in New York for a foiled 1990s Manila-based plot to hijack U.S. airliners. So is another war court defendant, Zanzibar-born Ahmed Ghailani, indicted in the 1998 East Africa Embassies bombings.

Former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose New York office prosecuted more al Qaeda cases than any other, says there is no one-size-fits-all place to hold them -- in the United States, at least.

And no single trial venue.

''We've so injured our credibility as a nation and as a source of fair justice with Guantánamo, you need to close it,'' she said. ``That could mean you reopen it somewhere else with a different name and start over.''

She served during the Clinton years, and her office got convictions in the first World Trade Center plot. But it was ''excruciatingly difficult to do,'' she said, to balance secrets and sources and still hold fair trials. ''To think now we can . . . send all those people to the Southern District of New York does not compute,'' she warned.

At the core of the dilemma is how much of Bush detention doctrine to discard.

Jeh Johnson, who was a Pentagon lawyer in the Clinton administration, is leading the effort. He has been hearing from the Defense Department divisions that administer detainee policy and did not respond to a request for an interview. ''There are people who are detained lawfully by the military in this conflict,'' said Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress, a policy think tank.

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