GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — The U.S. military is rehearsing for hearings on whether 14 top terror suspects can be held indefinitely without charge as enemy combatants, but defense lawyers say the outcome is preordained.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and the 13 others will be the highest-profile detainees to undergo the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals, and the first to do so in two years. The proceedings, expected early next year, are open to the media.

At the hearings, a military panel will evaluate whether the men should be classified as “enemy combatants,” a designation which allows them to be held indefinitely and prevents them from challenging their detention in the U.S. court system.

“The biggest thing we’re doing is opening up the books, reviewing procedures and conducting rehearsals so that we do it correctly,” said Navy Capt. Philip Waddingham, the lead officer at Guantanamo for the Pentagon-based office in charge of determining detainees’ status.

It is unclear whether Mohammed and the others — who until recently were being held in secret CIA prisons — will agree to attend the hearings. If they do, the military says they will remain shackled and would be forbidden to talk to reporters.

The rehearsals are being conducted inside the same space reserved for the hearings — a small room inside a trailer equipped with a few leather chairs, one plastic seat for the detainee, and little else.

Combatant Status Review Tribunals were held for 558 detainees between July 2004 and January 2005. All but 38 were deemed enemy combatants.

Defense attorneys have condemned the hearings as shams because classified evidence is withheld from the detainees and they are not afforded defense lawyers.

“There is no question that these 14 have no chance,” said Brent Mickum, an attorney who represents two Britons at Guantanamo. “The decision has (already) been made that they are enemy combatants.”

At the hearings, a panel of three officers will evaluate whether detainees merit the designation. A military “personal representative” will help prisoners prepare for the proceedings.

Bush announced on Sept. 6 that the 14 detainees had been transferred to Guantanamo.

Mohammed, who was believed to be the No. 3 al-Qaida leader, has not been seen in public since he was captured in Pakistan in 2003. The others include the alleged architects of the USS Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000 and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

The 14 are in a maximum-security section of the prison, which sprawls over a cactus-studded patch of arid ground overlooking the Caribbean. Officials say they are treated like other detainees, and can receive reading materials and have access to mail censored by the military.

Waddingham said in September that he expected the hearings for the 14 new detainees to be held within three months. That timeframe has been pushed back to early 2007 as top officials at the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the military Joint Task Force in charge of the prison camps coordinate the proceedings, he said.

About 380 men have been transferred from Guantanamo to other countries since the detention center opened in January 2002. About 395 detainees remain, most of them held for nearly five years without charge on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

U.S. authorities repatriated a 28-year-old Bangladeshi man on Sunday after years of imprisonment in Guantanamo, a police official at the airport in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka said. The official, Tahera Banu, said the man was being interrogated.