For months now, John McCain and Barack Obama have peppered their campaign speeches with pledges to close the Guantánamo Bay prison camps.

Both have cast the detention center as harmful to U.S. foreign policy and a source of international alienation. Both say they would move the terrorism suspects to U.S. soil.

But delve a little deeper, and that's where the harmony ends.

An analysis of McCain campaign statements and policy proposals shows that the Vietnam-era prisoner of war would seek to beef up the Bush administration's detainee doctrine.

And Barack Obama would seek to dismantle some of its key tenets.

So much so that Obama welcomed the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision June 12 that restored to war-on-terrorism captives at Guantánamo the right to sue for their freedom in U.S. courts.

The presumed Democratic presidential candidate called it ``an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.''

In contrast, his Republican rival, McCain, echoed White House sentiment to condemn the Supreme Court for handing down ``one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.''

''We made it very clear that these are enemy combatants,'' he said. ``They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens of this country have.''

At McCain campaign headquarters, national security advisor Randy Scheunemann bristles at the notion that the Arizona senator has walked in lockstep with Bush administration policy.

Rather, Scheunemann said, McCain has been a maverick. He publicly advocated closure of the camps long before the Bush administration, and has pledged in his campaign to do so to enhance this country's international standing.

''He saw the problems that were created in our international relationships -- whether law enforcement or intelligence cooperation or in the image of the United States -- certainly long before the Bush administration did,'' Scheunemann said.

On closure, he said, ``It's not just an aspirational goal. It's an action item. Sen. McCain has said he will close it. He hasn't couched it. He said it will be closed.''

Also at issue is how the Bush administration will tweak detention policy before ending its term. Bush has said that he, too, would like to close the prison camps.

None of the three men has said when.

Nor will they say, for sure, where they would move the prisoners for whom the State Department cannot negotiate repatriation or third-country resettlement.

By then, federal judges may have also started to weigh in on the constitutionality of another building block of Bush administration detention policy -- the Guantánamo war court.

But McCain sees no obstacle to holding military commission trials in the United States, Scheunemann said. The Pentagon presently proposes to try 80 men.

The Obama campaign is short on specifics, and in response to questions submitted by The Miami Herald was at times vague and contradictory.

Are the 265 war-on-terrorism captives enemy combatants? POWs? Suspected criminals captured overseas?

Obama doesn't say. Comments from his advisors suggest that an Obama administration would crack each man's military intelligence file to decide, on a case-by-case basis.

''Until a new administration has the ability to learn what we can't without the benefit of classified information about the nature of the detailed cases against each of these individuals, it would be sort of foolish to speculate,'' campaign foreign policy advisor Susan Rice said on National Public Radio.

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