The five-year-old military prison at Guantánamo Bay, with its indefinite detention rules, lack of judicial review and insufficiently regulated interrogation techniques, is an ugly stain on America’s long tradition of respect for the rule of law. Yet it seems the Bush administration has no intention of closing the facility unless Congress forces him to do so. This week, Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation aimed at doing just that. Her bill would shut down the Guantánamo prison and transfer the 385 or so people still held there to more conventional, and accountable, detention facilities, either for trial in the US or repatriation to their own countries.

Previous Congressional efforts, like the Detainee Treatment Act 2005 and the Military Commissions Act 2006, only made matters worse by limiting judicial review and legalising lawless executive branch behaviour. By contrast, the Feinstein bill strikes at the heart of the problem. Many of those prisoners may not be dangerous terrorists at all, but people scooped up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere. The only way to determine who should continue to be held and who should not is through genuine trials, not dubious military commission proceedings, which produce confessions or plea deals that exchange early releases for pledges of public silence.