Mohamedou Ould Slahi and over 100 other men remain at Guantanamo, held indefinitely without effective legal recourse. So long as it remains open, the detention camp poses a threat to liberty around the world, as there is nothing to stop a President from seizing and imprisoning there anyone for any reason at all.

If the president is serious about wanting to close the prison, and I hope he is, here are some helpful suggestions.

In the year since this latest promise, only 12 men have been released. Some 154 prisoners remain, half of whom were unanimously cleared years ago by high-level government officials.

While some Republicans are wont to decry anti-Guantanamo liberals as "anti-American," the only anti-American thing in this debate is Guantanamo itself. For it goes against everything our nation professes to respect and love.

The current review process is an improvement over the old one, in that the detainee is now assigned two "personal representatives" to help him. But as in Afghanistan, neither is a lawyer or trained advocate. And neither has a budget to do any real investigation of the case.