The transfers would be similar to the renditions, or transfers of captives to other countries, carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency, but are subject to stricter approval within the government, and face potential opposition from the C.I.A. as well as the State and Justice Departments, the officials said.

The man behind the Pentagon plan is, of course, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

A Feb. 5 memorandum from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld calls for broader interagency support for the plan, starting with efforts to work out a significant transfer of prisoners to Afghanistan, the officials said. The proposal is part of a Pentagon effort to cut a Guantánamo population that stands at about 540 detainees by releasing some outright and by transferring others for continued detention elsewhere.

What's behind the move to reduce the population at Guantanamo? Is it finally some concern for the due process rights of the detainees? Not a chance. In fact, it's just the opposite. The Pentagon doesn't care for the restrictions the U.S. Courts have placed on their actions, so they want to move the show elsewhere--to foreign countries that won't have such concerns.

Defense Department officials said that the adverse court rulings had contributed to their determination to reduce the population at Guantánamo, in part by persuading other countries to bear some of the burden of detaining terrorism suspects.

Guantanamo has become useless.

In January, a senior American official said in an interview that most prisoners at Guantánamo no longer had any intelligence value and were not being regularly interrogated.

How about we just shut the place down?