...''What I'm saying is that there is a large percentage right now who are either high threat or high intelligence value, that right now there's no intention to try them before a military commission," Butler told the Globe. ''They're dangerous. And we have a responsibility, both to our forces . . . and the rest of the world, to not let those people back out."

Butler and other officials also described the factors that are being used to assess how dangerous a detainee might be (joining Al Qaeda after Sept. 11, 2001, for example, might be worse than joining earlier); the interrogation booths at Guantanamo (Arabic posters on the wall encourage confession as a ticket home); and the difficult negotiations with more than 40 countries to take back some of the detainees (if the countries agree to US terms). The officials discussed for the first time the military's Criminal Investigation Task Force, which has interrogated detainees and followed leads around the globe to find evidence of guilt or innocence.

Butler expressed frustration that the United States has not gotten the word out about the investigations, that painstaking action is taken for inaction. ''One of the things that doesn't seem to come across is that there is this extensive process to try to figure out who these detainees are, what kind of intelligence they have, what threat they represent, and to treat them accordingly," Butler said in the interview Thursday in Rumsfeld's suite at the Pentagon. ''We're not in the business of just holding people for the sake of it. . . . We realize that we can't do that. We have to have justifiable reasons to hold on to people."...

Some detainees are cooperative, and some have hardly said a word in two years. Some seem to have been radicalized by their long detention, the officials said, and others seem to have been mollified by contact with Americans, even Americans who are their jailers, and by medical care and literacy programs at Guantanamo.

''I've heard everything," Mallow said, ''from 'I just want to go back and be with my family' to 'I'd kill you today if I could get out of this chair.' "