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WASHINGTON - Three Guantanamo Bay detainees whose deaths were ruled a suicide in 2006 apparently had been transported from their cells hours before their deaths to a secret site on the island, an article in Harper’s magazine asserts.

Mr. Neely, an Army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Mr. Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC, which will be shown on Tuesday. Mr. Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantánamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Mr. Rasul, Mr. Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

The administration has signaled that some Guantanamo Bay detainees will be tried in federal court and some in military commissions. It also said that there may be a third category of prisoners who are deemed too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried because of a lack of evidence or the need to protect intelligence material. Administration officials said any system of indefinite detention will include legal safeguards such as periodic reviews by judges and congressional oversight. But human rights and civil liberties groups such as Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union oppose detention without trial.

Despite its repetition by the administration, often without challenge by the media, the premise that Guantánamo holds a substantial number of people who are too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted is groundless.

The U.N. team probing secret prisons plans to publish a major report this year. The project will review the broader history of clandestine detention centers, starting with their use in Latin America from the 1970s onward, then delving into the Bush administration's secret detentions and scrutinizing other countries suspected of still using such prisons.

The officials said that a task force reviewing detention policy would need another six months to complete its report and a second group, reviewing interrogation policy, would need two more months to finish its report to Mr. Obama.

No one seems to know how old Mohammed Jawad was when he was seized by Afghan forces in Kabul six and a half years ago and turned over to American custody. Some reports say he was 14. Some say 16. The Afghan government believes he was 12.

Separately, administration lawyers urged a federal judge late yesterday to dismiss a civil lawsuit filed against former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other Bush officials by the families of two detainees who committed suicide in 2006 after four years of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. The families allege that military leaders violated the men's constitutional rights.

Half of the poll respondents said closing the prison would have no effect on protecting the nation from terror threats, but 3 in 10 said they thought it would make the United States less safe. Many of the detainees being held at the prison have not been charged, and nearly 7 in 10 people surveyed said they would support charging them or releasing them back to the country of their capture. Just 24 percent said the detainees should continue to be held without charge for as long as the government deems necessary.