The clock is ticking on the Bush years; instead of eyeing Iran, the president should be taking a look south, to Cuba, to the one place he can make strides towards making America safer and restoring her prestige abroad.

This week a D.C. federal court decision — the first challenge of detainee habeas corpus rights since the Supreme Court's Boumediene v. Bush ruled to allow such cases — dealt the first of likely many rebukes to the quality of evidence used to withhold suspected terrorists.

The Federal Court's unanimous decision, handed down by a less than liberal bench, held that there was no credible reason for a Chinese man's six years of detention. An onslaught of similar habeas reviews is undoubtedly being prepared — as they should be — by lawyers around the country.

But the press has allowed John McCain and Barack Obama to skate by saying relatively little. The few times I've seen Obama speak to the issue, he's garnered loud approval by simply suggesting that the base be closed, the crowd failing to question what a policy might mean or produce in terms of actual change.

Most liberal observers have failed to realize that both candidates actually advocate moving detainees stateside — yes, importing accused terrorists, a decision many will find difficult to stomach — largely to Fort Leavenworth, a military prison in Kansas.

Currently, there are some 270 combatants at Gitmo. To those that have paid attention, that number may seem low. As of September 2007, some 340 detainees were residing at the base, and before that, in August 2002, there were just under 600 being held.

The fact is that the Bush administration caved under pressure, from both home and abroad, and started deporting prisoners as calls for legitimate legal proceedings gained standing. The president may have made suspected terrorists the nation's largest export; all told, 770 have cycled through the camp. Most were shipped off for further detention in their native countries; others, on occasion, were granted full-fledged freedom. The Washington Post has reported that the U.S. has recaptured at least 10 of those released from Guantanamo who had returned to the jihad.

These proxy-held detainees will become a lever of sorts, on which allies and foes in the region — both of which have been called upon to torture and detain our exports — can lean upon to influence U.S. policy.

Any request to Morocco, the House of Saud or the Hashemite Kingdom to take steps toward democracy or to produce more oil or to advance women's rights will be met with a gentle reminder — a reminder of the dozens and sometimes hundreds of extremists that each of the kingdoms is holding for us. Simply put, the current policy exhausts all moral and political capital we have in the region.

Additionally, what the Bush administration seems to have neglected the region's rich history of amnesty. Many of the jihadis being captured on the battlefield today have been previously detained for extremist acts. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's number two, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, and Omar Abdel Rahman, the man found guilty of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are some of the more prominent figures who were previously detained but released amid general amnesties. The changing of rulers and king's birthdays traditionally mark the occasion for such liberations.

More simply, regimes often open jails in hopes that extremists will end up getting killed in the line of fire. It was a practice widely employed during the Afghan-Soviet campaign, and Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA division assigned to tracking Osama bin Laden, notes that 30,000 prisoners — 137 of known al Qaeda affiliation — have been released from jails across the Muslim world since the beginning of the American campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Bush administration has backed itself into a dark corner. It's put those most dangerous to us in the hands of those governments we should trust least, and for those it continues to detain it appears to lack the legal standing necessary to hold them. Further, allegations that we're employing prison ships, CIA black sites and the practice of rendition — despite the president's 2006 disavowal of such measures — continue to gain credibility.

In short, the detainee issue has become a time bomb, of whose clock and blast strength the world has yet to consider or see. The president, in these final hours, should be pouring all the resources he can find into building credible cases against those prisoners at Guantanamo who actually deserve to be there. Limiting the size of the bomb is the best we can do at this point.

Brian Till can be contacted at brian.m.till@gmail.com. To find out more about the author and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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