HE has delivered on more of his campaign pledges than many other American leaders, some of them of a truly historic nature.

But there is one unfulfilled promise from President Obama’s 2008 campaign that he must deliver on in the final year of his tenure.

He must close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, where the first inmates began arriving 14 years ago. The prisoners were dumped in a legal black hole, stripped of any rights and often subjected to egregious forms of torture, or “enhanced interrogation” to use the sanitised vocabulary of the Bush years.

During his 2008 campaign, President Obama made a pledge that he would close the facility, and either send the prisoners held there to their own countries or transfer them to US soil for trial.

That pledge was abandoned in early 2011 because the effort was “interfering in other legislative priorities”, specifically the president’s determined focus on obtaining Congressional approval for his landmark healthcare initiative.

Today, many years after the infamous opening of the prison, the president is said to be considering the use of executive powers to finally close the facility and move the remaining 103 prisoners there to their home countries.

It is not known what he intends to do with the 50 to 60 detainees inside who are considered too dangerous to be released, and who cannot be tried because evidence against them has been gathered from intelligence sources and cannot be presented in a court of law.

In any case, a way must be found to close the prison because it has become a symbol of oppression, and all that is wrong with the way America has been conducting the so-called war on terror.

Torture and arbitrary detention are tools used by authoritarian regimes, and when a country that claims to be the purveyor of superior values around the world takes recourse to them, it only undermines its own moral authority and credibility in a war that is more about values and perceptions than it is about territory.

The way forward may well prove complicated considering that Congress is still signalling its opposition to shutting the facility down. But getting this job done is critical for the US if it wants to rescue its tattered credibility in this war.

It is imperative that President Obama find a way to ensure that the detention facility is shut down before his term is over.

Published in Dawn, January 13th, 2016