The loud sigh of relief in and outside the US that greeted the court decision goes to underscore the growing concerns over America’s gulag around the world. Human rights groups have widely welcomed the court move urging the Bush administration to close the Bay and allow the detainees to go home.

Indeed, this is the most logical and reasonable course of action available before the administration. As this paper has repeatedly argued, the Guantanamo Bay militates against America’s hallowed traditions of respect for justice, fair trial, the rule of law and human rights. These ideals that had inspired America’s founding fathers in turn spawned democratic and civil rights movements everywhere. After all, it was an American visionary who had emphasised that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

The Cuba prison not only mocks the beliefs and ideals of the architects of democratic America such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but it also undermines its moral standing to promote these lofty ideas around the world.

It’s for the sake of these values, if nothing else, that the Bush administration must let the Bay detainees go home. God knows they have suffered enough for the sins they are almost certain not to have committed. Coinciding with the US court ruling, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a rights watchdog, has stressed that only 30 to 40 out of nearly 600 men held at the Bay could have some links with terror groups. Rest of them are considered innocent. They ended up at the Bay because they were found at a wrong place at a wrong time in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere.