WASHINGTON -- Raising a thorny issue that could put Congress on a collision course with the Bush administration, Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter yesterday held the first hearings on the rights of detainees by the U.S. government at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Arlen Specter

The hearing marked the beginning of a process in which Specter and other members of the Judiciary Committee will try to fashion legislation to clarify the law governing some 520 "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo.

Many of the detainees have been held without a trial since the U.S. opened the detention center in January of 2002.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., noting there was no end in sight to the war on terrorism, asked J. Michael Wiggins, a deputy associate attorney general, whether there was any limit to how long the U.S. government could hold Guantanamo detainees.

"It's our position that, legally, they can be held in perpetuity," Wiggins said.

Specter and another prominent Republican, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey O. Graham, said yesterday that Congress must step in to ensure a fair judicial process. Specter said a series of conflicting opinions in U.S. district courts -- where two judges have said detainees' rights were being violated and a third said their rights were being upheld -- along with a 2004 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, amount to "a crazy quilt" that has left many questions about the rights of detainees and the circumstances under which they can be locked up without access to lawyers or other legal protections.

Graham argued that the murky legal situation at Guantanamo had compounded America's image problem around the world.

"I think it would be tremendously helpful if the Congress and the administration came together with some general statutory language to help define what's going on at Guantanamo Bay -- to better define what an enemy combatant is, to make sure that due process is affordable," Graham said.

Last year, after the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had not been charged could challenge their detention and status as enemy combatants in the U.S. courts, the Bush administration set up a system of military panels to review the evidence in each legal challenge.

But just as the first trials were getting under way, that process was halted by a district judge who found that the military commission process did not adequately protect the rights of the detainee who was the first to face off before a commission.

Since then, the system has been in limbo, as that case and some others have wound their way through federal appeals. Specter said yesterday that Congress may use its power to specify time parameters to speed those detainee cases through the courts.

But several senators expressed exasperation with the length of time it has taken the government to charge detainees with specific crimes, even before the district court ruling stopped the military commission trials.

So far, prosecutors have readied just 12 cases to go through the military commission process set up by the administration.

"It's kind of hard for a layperson sitting here to understand what's going on," said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio. "This is a judiciary committee. We're lawyers here. I'm a former prosecutor ... and our whole training, our whole system is get people to tell [us] what the facts are -- you charge them and you move ahead.

"What's going on here?" DeWine asked, "this seems to be a horribly slow process."

Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway, a Defense Department legal adviser, responded that the chief goals of keeping prisoners at Guantanamo were to get them off the battlefield and to gather intelligence. The law enforcement phase of their detention, he said, could not move forward until the intelligence gathering process was complete.

"I don't know exactly how many people that they're done with," Hemingway said, referring to detainees who had completed the intelligence phase of the process.

But the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, expressed dismay that not one military commission case had concluded its work.

"Far from assuring swift justice, we haven't seen any justice," Leahy said. "The administration says that these detainees pose a threat to the safety of Americans. ... If that's true, if they pose a threat to us, then there has to be evidence to support that. ... If there's evidence, then let's prosecute them."

In a second panel, several lawyers who have represented Guantanamo detainees testified about what they view as flaws in the process.

Joseph Margulies, who represented a Guantanamo Bay detainee in the case that went before the Supreme Court, told senators yesterday that the military commission review process is "a sham" that mocks the nation's commitment to due process.

He said the definition of who qualifies as an "enemy combatant" is far too broad, and noted that accused persons cannot review secret evidence that is held against them.

Margulies used the story of one of his clients to illustrate what he sees as flaws in the system. In a well-publicized case, his client, Mamdouh Habib, was taken into custody in Pakistan and held in Egypt where he was subjected to what his lawyer described as psychological torture. Margulies said the government planned to use the statements Habib had made during his detention in Egypt to continue holding him at Guantanamo Bay. The case was publicized by the press, and Habib has since been released.

"Any process that relies on information secured in this way is just not worthy of American justice. It's as simple as that," Margulies said.

But in yesterday's panel, former U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, who served under President George H.W. Bush, gave a vigorous defense of military commission process. He said the criticisms leveled against the administration's detention policies were "totally without foundation and unjustified."

"We've been holding enemy combatants ... for 230 years in various facilities," Barr said. "There is nothing punitive about it. This is not a legal proceeding. There is no need to bring charges. They're being held because they were identified on the battlefield as threats to our forces."