(AP) Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says most suspected terrorists at a U.S. prison camp in Cuba will probably be detained for the course of the global war on terrorism rather than face trial. That sparked criticism from lawyers who said U.S. legal tradition insists on a transparent and open judicial process.

Rumsfeld said Wednesday he expects some trials but prefers that most continue to be held at the Guantanamo Bay facility.

"Our interest is in not trying them and letting them out," he said. "Our interest is in - during this global war on terror - keeping them off the streets, and so that's what's taking place."

Erwin Chemerinsky, law professor at University of Southern California, said there is no authority in American or international law to hold these people indefinitely with no judicial process.

"It's outrageous," Chemerinsky said. "There are no signs that the war on terrorism is nearing an end, so the government is saying it can hold people indefinitely and likely for the rest of their lives without complying with the requirements of international law."

Human rights groups and countries of detained nationals have criticized the United States for refusing to designate the detainees as prisoners of war under international conventions.

The Guantanamo Bay detention center holds about 660 men from 42 countries detained for alleged links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network or the ousted Afghan Taliban regime that sheltered it. They include three teenagers whom the military may recommend for release soon.

Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School, is also critical of the government's plan. He said people are sometimes detained as enemy combatants during wars but the same reasoning doesn't apply in a nontraditional conflict like the war on terrorism.

"It is a war that does not have an end and the battlefield is spread across the world," Cuellar said.

"Whether an administrative or judicial process, there needs to be an accounting of why someone is being held," he said. "That's why we have a judicial process."

Rumsfeld said the Pentagon is prepared to proceed to trial if President Bush makes that decision.

"We have the apparatus arranged, ready, and we have a very fine group of advisers as to how to do it in the event it has to be done," he said. "But for the moment, we don't have any candidates."

Still, the vagueness made some in the legal profession uneasy.

"How long could that be?" asked Stephen Dycus, Vermont Law School professor. "If the answer is potentially forever, then we've really created a new institution by which we can take people, lock them away - and that's not locking them up in the same way for a common criminal, but isolating them from the world, held incommunicado, where they don't have access to counsel or the court system."

Part of the problem with the system Rumsfeld discussed, is that there's no way to find out what's going on or to test the validity of their detention, said Dycus.

"There has been no demonstration that we couldn't put these guys on trial; if indeed they are criminals, lock them up and keep them out of trouble," he said.