Guantanamo state of mind: President Obama should reject the arrogance that made the infamous prison possible.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Columns - Barack Obama on Guantanamo Naval Base - Column

IN JANUARY 2002, the Pentagon began imprisoning men it described as "very hard cases"--"the worst of the worst" terrorists in American custody--at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. During the next seven years it released more than 500 of them. "What's left" Vice President Dick Cheney declared in the final week of the Bush administration, "is the hard core." That was a few days before the Pentagon released half a dozen more.

Unless the Bush administration recklessly loosed hundreds of hardened terrorists on the world, its initial descriptions of the detainees were mistaken. That pattern of error reinforces the argument against allowing the executive branch to wield the unchallengeable authority it asserted at Guantanamo.

As President Obama proceeds with his plan to close the prison, he should recognize that Guantanamo is not so much a place as a state of mind. It's an attitude that says: We know who the bad guys are, and we're not about to let anyone endanger national security by second-guessing us.

The Bush administration manifestly did not know who the bad guys were. Its methods for identifying "unlawful enemy combatants"--defined as anyone, anywhere who belonged to or supported the Taliban or Al Qaeda-were sloppy. More than 90 percent of the 779 men held at Guantanamo were captured not by Americans but by Afghan militiamen, Pakistani security forces, or other parties of dubious reliability, often in anticipation of bounties promised by the U.S. Many detainees were minor hangers-on or entirely innocent, held based on the uncorroborated word of self-interested captors or of prisoners eager to please interrogators who used "enhanced" techniques to extract accusations.

The Pentagon acknowledged that 17 Chinese Muslims captured in 2002 were incorrectly identified as unlawful enemy combatants but said it could not send them back to China because they might be persecuted there. At the same time, it appealed a federal judge's October 2008 order to release them inside the U.S.

Haji Bismullah, one of the men freed just before Obama's inauguration, fought against the Taliban and later served as a regional official in Afghanistan's pro-American government. After members of a rival clan who coveted...