"We stated from the beginning that we don't want to hold anybody any longer than absolutely necessary," said Maj. Ted Wadsworth, a Pentagon spokesman. "The process of sorting people to determine their status has begun." 

Those released were determined to be noncombatants, he said, meaning they did not engage in hostile acts during the war and were not part of a military force. 

For instance, they may have been civilians caught up in the fighting, Wadsworth said, adding that warring forces have the right and the obligation to take from the battlefield anyone who is a risk to their security or who may be in harm's way. 

Taking into account the release announced Friday, coalition forces now hold 6,850 prisoners who were on the battlefield, he said. 

Wadsworth said he had no information on where the 925 prisoners were released or other details of their release. A tent city that could hold up to 24,000 prisoners is being constructed in the southern Iraqi city of Umm Qasr, but not all prisoners have been transferred there.Some remain at other holding facilities and some remain with the coalition units that captured them, he said. 

At the prisoner facility under construction, an interrogation facility also is planned, officials have said, adding that not all prisoners have been identified. 

Authorities had similar problems obtaining the true identities of terror suspects from the counter-terror war in Afghanistan. Several hundred are still being held at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. 

Among the nearly 8,000 taken prisoner in Iraq, defense officials have said there are a number of high-ranking officers. They hope to get information from them that might lead to the discovery of weapons of mass destruction which the Bush administration says the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein had - and which was part of the justification for war. 

There are no current plans to send prisoners to the facility in Guantanamo, officials have said. 

Meantime, determining whether Saddam Hussein is dead or alive has taken a back seat in military strategy to more pressing matters such as the search for weapons and securing Baghdad. 

White House chief of staff Andrew Card said this week he believes Saddam is dead. If Card is right, what's left of the deposed Iraqi leader's body is probably buried in tons of rubble in one of two huge bomb craters in the Iraqi capital. 

U.S. military teams have investigated the sites of both the March 19 and April 7 airstrikes aimed at killing Saddam and other top Iraqi leaders. But sifting through all that debris could take weeks of work with heavy equipment, and it's not a priority, Pentagon officials said Thursday. 

A higher priority is finding and eliminating any weapons of mass destruction. That, too, probably will take a long time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday. 

The key will be help from Iraqis who know details of any chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs, Rumsfeld said. 

"I don't think we'll discover anything, myself," Rumsfeld said at a town hall-style meeting with Pentagon employees. 

"I think what will happen is we'll discover people who will tell us where to go find it. It is not like a treasure hunt where you just run around looking everywhere, hoping you find something." 

U.S. troops have found suspicious chemicals and facilities at a number of sites but tests on the materials have proved negative or inconclusive. Eliminating such weapons was a chief reason President Bush gave for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that began March 20. 

Military teams have visited three dozen to four dozen suspected weapons of mass destruction sites in Iraq out of hundreds on lists drawn up by U.S. intelligence agencies, a senior defense official said Thursday. One team on Thursday submitted for further analysis samples taken at a site near the Tallil air base in southern Iraq, the official said. 

A Defense Department employee asked Rumsfeld what could be done so the United States would not be accused of planting any chemical or biological weapons that might be discovered. Rumsfeld said he believed such charges were likely and there was little the United States could do to avoid the charge. 

Only in the past few days, Rumsfeld said, have enough weapons searchers arrived to make progress in parts of Iraq where U.S. intelligence indicates chemical or biological weapons could be found. 

"The teams have been trained in chain of control, really like a crime scene," he said. "That will not stop certain countries and certain types of people from claiming, inaccurately, that it was planted." 

Appearing with Rumsfeld was Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who cautioned against thinking that the fall from power of Saddam's Baath Party rule means the war is over. 

"I wish I could say that we're winding all this down, but I can't," Myers said. 

Rumsfeld made a similar point. 

"The war is not over," he said. "We know that. There are still pockets of resistance, shots are still being fired and people will still be killed. And as we gather here people are still fighting in Iraq and elsewhere." 

But with the air campaign in Iraq all but over, more U.S. air power is leaving the region. 

A second Navy aircraft carrier departed the Persian Gulf on Thursday, leaving only the USS Nimitz battle group on station in the Gulf, defense officials said. Both the Navy and the Air Force are bringing aircraft home to allow pilots and crews a respite after one of the most intense air campaigns in history. 

The USS Constellation, on its final overseas mission before going into a scheduled retirement, left the Gulf on Thursday, one day after the carrier USS Kitty Hawk departed for its homeport in Yokosuka, Japan, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

Two other carriers that participated in the air war from positions in the eastern Mediterranean - the USS Harry S. Truman and the USS Theodore Roosevelt - were going to alternate on port visits in the Mediterranean but not head home yet, the officials said. 

The USS Carl Vinson, which took the Kitty Hawk's place in the Pacific in February, was making a port call in Guam but was to return to the vicinity of Japan and remain while the Kitty Hawk undergoes repairs in a Japanese shipyard, officials said. 

The Pentagon said the U.S. death toll from the war in Iraq rose by one to 126. Marine Cpl. Jason David Mileo, 20, of Centreville, Md., was shot and killed Monday after being mistaken for an Iraqi soldier, it said. He was in the Baghdad area, assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, whose headquarters is at Twentynine Palms, Calif.