CAAB

It is time to close the Guantanamo gulag.

The holding pen for hundreds of alleged terrorists at the U.S. naval facility in Cuba has so far produced charges against exactly three people. None is a foreign terrorist.

All are serving in the American military or were working for it. They translated for or ministered to the hundreds of detainees, most picked up on the Afghan battlefield, who have been held for nearly two years without charge and beyond the reach of law.

Military officials suspect an espionage ring at the camp, though the minimalist charges brought on Friday against Army Capt. James Yee - failing to follow orders and improperly handling classified material - cast some doubt on the most menacing theories.

Has any alleged terrorist in confinement at the camp been given a bill of particulars against him? No. Has any proceeding that could lead to the dispensing of justice against a terrorist begun? No.

Does keeping this camp operating now help, or hurt, U.S. security?

The camp's mere existence is a festering sore in the sour relations between the United States and the rest of the world, including its closest allies. Tony Blair's government has vigorously protested the extra-judicial and indefinite internment of detainees who are British citizens. It defies the Magna Carta.

The British wonder aloud why the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, was prosecuted in U.S. courts while no such process - no legal process at all - is afforded some citizens of a nation that fights alongside ours in Afghanistan and in Iraq, too. The Lindh case, said Peter Reid, a spokesman for the British embassy, has led Britons to believe there is "a different rule for your guys than ours."

The British Court of Appeal, ruling in an unsuccessful case brought by one detainee, expressed anger at the "legal black hole" into which its citizens have fallen, an abyss where they are "subject to indefinite detention in territory over which the United States has exclusive control, with no opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of [their] detention before any court or tribunal."

Two British citizens and one Australian are among the six - out of some 660 - Guantanamo detainees whom President George W. Bush has designated as eligible for military tribunals. But the rules for the tribunals shock these allies. They include the use of secret evidence that the accused and his attorney might never see, the monitoring of conversations between defense lawyers and their clients, the proviso that, even if acquitted, the president is empowered to keep a detainee locked up forever.

The British and Australians have won the concession that their citizens shall not be subject to the death penalty. Negotiations on other matters continue.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, meanwhile, has taken the extraordinary step of going public with its alarm over the impact of indefinite detention on the mental health of detainees, particularly juveniles. Confidential negotiations with U.S. authorities have yielded some changes in camp policies, but "serious divergences of opinion" persist, the Red Cross says.

It is not possible to conclude that holding these detainees still has intelligence value. They were picked up nearly two years ago. Any knowledge of plots or the whereabouts of terrorist leaders is, at best, stale. Many still claim - in a variety of failed attempts at winning a hearing - that they are merely farmers and clerks and shopkeepers swept up in the intensity and confusion of battle.

There is an obvious way out. Convene the type of "competent tribunal" called for under the Geneva Conventions to determine who is a civilian and who is a prisoner of war. Civilians suspected of terrorist activity could then be tried in U.S. courts, or prosecuted in their home countries. Legitimate prisoners of war could be held until the end of hostilities. The fight would then be reduced to when, if ever, there is an endpoint to the war on terror.

The Guantanamo prison must be closed because it breaks faith with our values and breaches the trust the world has had in them. It offends the rule of law we so piously vow to protect. It serves no purpose other than to remind others of our breathtaking hypocrisy. And, apparently, to provide a haven for a disloyal few who would threaten us from within.