So President Obama, like many presidents before him and no doubt many to follow, has employed a routine end-of-hostilities POW swap. For five Guantánamo prisoners, he has managed to bring Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl home. Bravo. But while Republicans do their level best to Benghazi-fy this rather uncontroversial news, the real story on Gitmo is elsewhere.

Lost in the kerfuffle over the Bergdahl-Taliban swap is one simple and very positive development: we now know that, when push comes to shove, the Defense Department and the White House can work together to close Guantánamo Bay. No, shutting down the prison isn't a matter of flipping a switch. But break the matter down into individual cases and achievable diplomatic solutions tend to present themselves.

Never mind the so-called "Taliban Five" – Obama's real chance on Gitmo today is for the Cleared 78. With another stroke of Obama's pen, many of those prisoners could be on a plane back to their families tomorrow. The president is plainly concerned with how this prison will affect his legacy; in releasing the cleared, he has a genuine opportunity to solve much of the remaining problem before the end of his term.

For years we at Reprieve have represented many of these people: a slew of warehoused individuals, cleared for years – meaning that they were determined by every security agency you and I have ever heard of to be no threat to anyone. (At the beginning of President Obama's term, he asked all the security agencies to look again at the Gitmo files, and the cleared prisoners passed this test unanimously. Many of them were held safe to release earlier, under the Bush administration, and have been waiting for their number to come up ever since.)

Once you treat these men as individuals, and not the orange-jumpsuited scarecrows whom Republicans tend to deploy for political gain, solutions to the Gitmo conundrum quickly appear.

Shaker Aamer, a permanent resident of the UK with four British children living in London, has been held in Guantánamo Bay since 2002. Photograph: Courtesy of Reprieve Photograph: Courtesy of Reprieve

Take the cleared Briton, Shaker Aamer. He's been told he would go home since 2007, and has a wife and four kids waiting for him in London. Prime Minister David Cameron has said getting him home is a top priority and has raised his case directly with Obama, because his ongoing detention is an embarrassment for Her Majesty's Government.

So what, precisely, is the holdup? If Qatar can be trusted to look after five senior Taliban, it's plain that America's closest counter-terror ally, Britain, is competent to receive a man nobody suggests is dangerous.



Another of the Cleared 78 is our client Abu Wa'el Dhiab, recently in the news when a federal judge ordered Obama's Justice Department to turn over 43 videotapes of a riot squad hauling him like a sack of potatoes into a force-feeding chair. He's Syrian, requires a wheelchair much of the time, and all he asks is for his wife and children to see him again. On the phone to me recently, he said:

Five years ago, Obama said he was going to close this place and let the cleared people out. Meanwhile I have lost much of my life here, as well as my loved ones. Why are they doing this to us? I have no problem with America. For how long are they going to make me suffer?

Dhiab, like a number of my clients, has been told that he would go home for so long that he no longer believes it. So last year he started to refuse food, in an agonizing but peaceful protest, because he sincerely feels to hunger strike is the only option he has left other than silently waiting to die in American military prison.

Gitmo authorities have responded to these hunger strikes with total brutality. In letters, in visits, and across phone lines so crackly they might as well be on the moon, Dhiab and many other hunger-striking clients report grisly scenes not heard of at Guantánamo since the early days of George W Bush. Men have been left to defecate in the restraint chair in which they are force-fed. They have vomited nutritional supplement – and blood - onto themselves, and have been made to go through the whole process again. Tears have streamed down their faces when unskilled medical staff botch the tube insertion in their nose again and again in a single feeding.

These days you rarely hear about this appalling abuse of cleared men, because the Defense Department last year basically declared the hunger strike "over" and (conveniently) imposed a total media blackout, refusing even to count hunger-strikers and force-fed prisoners - indeed, refusing even to use the words 'hunger strike'. Meanwhile, because official Gitmo policy is now that a prisoner must be groped by military police as many as four times to talk to a lawyer on the telephone, it is harder than ever to get the truth out.

All this is happening now, on Obama's watch. Which rather raises the question: if he could exercise his authority as commander-in-chief to bring his soldier home for the price of the Taliban, why not use the same power to bring back some of America's lost honor and release a few good cleared men? In the meantime, why not restore a shred of decency to Gitmo by treating hunger strikers with basic decency?

While much has been made of Congressional Republicans' steadfast opposition to shutting the place down, ending one of the more regrettable chapters in America's recent history is not as difficult as commonly claimed.

Release the cleared prisoners. Send Shaker Aamer to Britain and people like Dhiab to anywhere that is safe. Press reports have suggested there are countries waiting to accept cleared men, just as Qatar stepped in to assist the swap for Bergdahl. There is no sensible reason to put him through even one more day of this agony.

We win a small victory for the rule of law and our shared humanity with every cleared prisoner. Each victory would look not entirely unlike the homecoming so many will celebrate for an American soldier later this month – a man who finally, tired and bewildered, steps down from a plane, tries to recognize his family for the first time in years, and begins the biggest challenge of all: starting his life anew.

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