GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — This was a sleepy Navy outpost before the U.S. began using it to hold prisoners in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks _ and it may soon become one again.

It is increasingly obvious that the days of this U.S. offshore prison are numbered. The Bush administration’s main rationale for holding terrorism suspects without trial vanished when the Supreme Court ruled on June 12 that they have certain legal rights. John McCain and Barack Obama have both called for the detention center to be shut.

But whoever becomes the new president will have to figure out what to do with those left at Guantanamo _ roughly 270 at present.

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has said he wants to move the detainees to the military’s prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. But finding room for them all might be a problem _ just over 400 inmates are now locked up at Fort Leavenworth, which has a capacity for 515.

McCain wants the prisoners tried at military commissions, or war crimes courts, which are allowed under a 2006 law that he supported. These commissions act as criminal courts run by the U.S. armed forces to try those considered enemies during wartime. So far, 19 Guantanamo detainees have been charged in such commissions.

Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, said he would close Guantanamo and move the detainees to both civilian and military facilities in the United States, including Leavenworth, according to campaign spokesman Reid Cherlin. Obama wants the detainees to be tried in federal criminal courts or in military courts martial.

The Pentagon now plans to try about 80 prisoners at military commissions, but another 130 are considered too dangerous to let go and won’t be prosecuted. About 60 are slated for transfer from Guantanamo, but the Pentagon says they can’t go home because their governments won’t accept them, might release them and create a security risk for the U.S., or might even torture them.

The Supreme Court’s latest ruling gave all detainees the right to petition federal judges for immediate release. In a separate case for an individual detainee, a federal appeals court in June decided he was not an enemy combatant and ordered the military to release him, transfer him or hold a new proceeding promptly.

Defense lawyers want the detention center closed and say the war crimes trials are unfair because they allow evidence obtained under harsh interrogations, even possibly by waterboarding, and permit hearsay. They say the prisoners include innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were sold to U.S. forces for bounties.

``President Bush, our commander in chief, perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not, started the U.S. down a slippery slope, a path that quickly descended, stopping briefly in the dark, Machiavellian world of the ends justify the means, before plummeting further into the bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture,’’ attorney Air Force Maj. David Frakt said in military court last month. Frakt represents an Afghan detainee who records show was subjected to sleep deprivation at Guantanamo months after he attempted suicide.

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