The Bush administration’s methodical disregard for the human rights of those detained in the campaign against terrorism has been disastrous for the global human rights cause, diminishing the moral standing of a government that traditionally was an ally in promoting human rights, and setting a powerful negative example for abusive governments around the world.  Undoing the damage done will require a public commitment to a new course and firm measures to implement that policy.  As first steps, the next president should:

• Close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, prosecuting those detainees implicated in terrorism and sending the others to their home countries or appropriate countries of resettlement, including the United States.
• Prosecute terrorism suspects in regular federal court rather than before military commissions, which have failed to provide basic due process.
• Reject preventive detention (detention without trial) as an alternative to prosecuting terrorism suspects.
• Reject the “global war on terrorism” as a legal basis for detaining individuals outside a recognizable battlefield to deprive them of basic criminal justice rights. 
• Issue an executive order to implement the bans on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment by requiring the CIA to abide by the interrogation rules that the US military has now adopted. 
• Put a definitive end to the CIA’s secret detention program in which apprehended individuals are “disappeared” without acknowledgment into unknown detention facilities and without access to anyone but their jailors and interrogators.
• Sign and press the Senate to ratify the Convention against Enforced Disappearance to signal an intention to never again engage in such practices.
• Stop renditions (returns) of terrorism suspects and others to countries where they are at risk of torture or ill-treatment.
• Ensure the establishment of a nonpartisan investigatory commission (“truth commission”), equipped with subpoena powers and adequate funding to investigate and publicly report on post-9/11 counterterrorism-related abuses, recommend how those responsible should be held accountable, and specify steps to ensure that such abuses are never repeated.