PRESIDENT Obama did not hesitate in taking a step toward restoring America's moral leadership by ordering the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp by this time next year. Countries that have rightly criticized the U.S. for its treatment of detainees should step forward to facilitate the shutdown by hosting those detainees who pose no threat.

In his first day as president, Obama ordered an immediate halt to the Bush administration's military commissions system for prosecuting detainees and signed an executive order to close the detention camp within a year. The new administration must decide how many detainees should be prosecuted, as well as where and under what system.

The directive simulates legislation sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the new chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that set a one-year deadline for Gitmo's closure. Her bill would have either charged and tried detainees in federal court, transferred them to a tribunal under United Nations authority, held them as prisoners of war, sent them to their homeland or simply released them.

  Sixty of the 245 detainees have been cleared for release but their home countries have balked at allowing their return. Human rights groups that have been critical of the Bush administration's policies should now direct their pressure on those countries.

Obama's order halts the prosecution of five detainees accused of coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks, including self-described mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was tortured by waterboarding, the pouring of water into a cloth placed over a prisoner's mouth to simulate drowning.

The order also requires the Central Intelligence Agency be limited to only 19 interrogation methods described in the Army Field Manual. President Bush had allowed CIA interrogators to use secret methods that went beyond those limitations.

The military commissions system stripped the accused terrorists of basic rights and condoned interrogation techniques that went beyond international standards. Susan Crawford, a retired judge who presided over military tribunals at Guantanamo, told the Washington Post last week that the U.S. tortured Saudi Mohammed al-Qahtani, the presumptive 20th hijacker in the 9/11 attacks.

  Crawford, the Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was defense secretary, said each technique used on Qahtani was “;authorized”; but “;a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health ... pushed me over the edge”; to call it torture. The techniques included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, she said.

In closing the Guantanamo prison and ending the CIA's secret interrogation of senior al-Qaida figures captured overseas and transferred to Guantanamo, the Obama administration should investigate the tactics used to interrogate them. While the president has said he plans to go forward with his implementation of his own policies rather than dwell on the past, those abuses should not be swept under the Bush/Cheney rug.