WASHINGTON, March 11 (Xinhuanet) -- The Pentagon is seeking to cutby more than half the detainee population at its detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in part by transferring hundredsof suspected terrorists to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen.

    A Feb. 5 memorandum from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called for broader interagency support for the plan, starting withefforts to work out a significant transfer of prisoners to Afghanistan, a report in Friday's edition of The New York Times quoted senior administration officials as saying.

    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, the officials said.

    The proposal came as the Bush administration reviewed the future of the naval base at Guantanamo as a detention center, after court decisions and shifts in public opinion have raised legal and political questions about the use of the facility.

    The White House initially embraced using Guantanamo as a holding place for terrorism suspects taken in Afghanistan, in partbecause the base was seen as beyond the jurisdiction of US law, but the US Supreme Court ruled last June that US law applied to Guantanamo and that prisoners there could challenge their detentions in federal courts.

    The report quoted Defense Department officials as saying that the adverse court rulings had contributed to their determination to reduce the population at Guantanamo, in part by persuading other countries to bear some of the burden of detaining terrorism suspects.

    The detainees at Guantanamo include more than 100 prisoners each from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, a senior administration official said.

    At its peak, there were more than 750 prisoners at Guantanamo. The United States has already dispatched 211 Guantanamo prisoners,with 65 transferred to the custody of other countries and the majority set free. Enditem