Few actions by a new president would draw a clearer distinction with President Bush than a pledge on Inauguration Day to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center and to adhere to the Geneva Conventions in the handling of war on terror prisoners.

During the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama called for closing Guantanamo, which has become a symbol of the Bush administration's human-rights abuses. McCain proposed a sensible alternative: the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Even Bush has said he wants to shutter the Cuban prison, but he has made no progress toward doing so.

Simply duplicating the legal conditions of Guantanamo on US soil would do little to restore America's reputation as a human-rights leader, however. The new president must also act quickly to return to prisoners the rights denied by Congress in 2006.

That is why it would be so important for the new president to repledge US adherence to the Geneva Conventions. Common Article 3 holds that trials of both prisoners of war and of captured combatants not granted that status must adhere to judicial guarantees "recognized as indispensable by all civilized peoples." The Supreme Court has already ruled that Congress acted unconstitutionally in stripping prisoners of their habeas corpus rights. The 2006 law also permits evidence gained through coercive methods, and limits inmates' rights to confront witnesses.

About 255 prisoners remain at Guantanamo of the more than 700 brought there. Most have returned to their home countries. In the almost seven years since the military began sending detainees there, just two have been convicted of any criminal offense. Federal criminal courts in the United States, on the other hand, have successfully tried and convicted such major terrorists as shoe-bomber Richard Reid and the Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, as well as other foreign and domestic terrorists from the pre-Sept. 11 era.