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The Bush administration faced pressure yesterday to overhaul how it brings foreign terrorism suspects to trial after the surprise dismissal of war-crimes charges against two prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

With only days to appeal, the White House said it disagreed with the separate rulings by U.S. military judges on Monday and denied it had suffered another setback after being forced by the Supreme Court to change the system just last year.

Advocates for the detainees hailed the decisions as a watershed that would unleash legal challenges to the 2006 U.S. law that established the current military-tribunal system.

And advocates and lawmakers in Congress said it was time to restore the rights of the prisoners to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, which Congress revoked last year.

About 380 foreign suspects are held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeast Cuba.

Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, called on the White House to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress in order to craft a new legal framework for the tribunals.

"The place to start is by restoring the hallmark of justice known as the great writ of habeas corpus," Mr. Leahy said.

The military judges dropped all charges against the only two Guantanamo prisoners facing trial: Canadian Omar Khadr and Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen.

Mr. Hamdan, a former driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, won a Supreme Court challenge last year that scrapped the first Guantanamo tribunal system and prompted Congress to create the new system.

The judges in the Hamdan and Khadr cases said they lacked jurisdiction because the defendants were classified as "enemy combatants" rather than "unlawful enemy combatants," as required by the system set in place by Congress.

The judges gave the Bush administration 72 hours to decide on an appeal. But the court authorized to hear appeals under the new system has yet to be created, said the chief defence counsel for the tribunals, Marine Colonel Dwight Sullivan.

"We don't agree with the ruling," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters in Prague, where President George W. Bush was meeting with leaders of the Czech Republic.

"In no way does this decision affect the appropriateness of the military-commission system."

But Zachary Katznelson of the British-based legal charity Reprieve, which represents 37 detainees at Guantanamo, said his group would push for the Supreme Court to examine the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that created the new system.

"It shows they can't even get the show trials right," Mr. Katznelson said.

Some analysts said no new congressional action was necessary, because Monday's rulings only required Defence Secretary Robert Gates to make administrative changes to allow the detainees to be designated as "unlawful enemy combatants."

"Some appear to be overreacting to what the judges held," said Scott Silliman of Duke University's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security.

Many military lawyers have argued for years that the United States should scrap the tribunals and conduct the trials in the court-martial system, where the rules are clear and legal landmarks are long-established.

"The military judges are capable of doing good work if we go back to the system that's tried and true, the court-martial," said Mr. Hamdan's military lawyer, Navy Lieutenant-Commander Charles Swift.

"The government should have seen that argument coming a long way away," Lt.-Col. Swift said. "That shows what happens when you throw together legislation, throwing out all the past precedents and try to get it done quick and dirty."