The United States should provide a home for those Guantánamo prisoners whom it cannot charge for lack of evidence or is unable to deport. That is the only way to bring an honourable end to one of the worst legacies of the Bush Administration.

That will not happen, however. US officials have put out feelers to dozens of countries, asking them to take in the now-unwanted prisoners who were scooped up with too little thought in the War on Terror. Even though it is the Bush Administration asking, other governments are, understandably, treating the request as a tender to bid for the favours of Barack Obama’s team. The President-elect has declared that one of his first acts will be to shut down the camp, a blight on the US’s reputation around the world. How better to help him to start with a clean moral slate than to give a good home to a few Guantánamo inmates?

This is ridiculous. The US rounded up these men too casually, failing in the heat of battle to distinguish fighters from bystanders, including those turned in for bounty by their compatriots. The tribunals it held after the men had been taken to Guantánamo Bay were merely a nod to the Geneva Conventions, which require a country to check that the PoWs it holds really are enemy fighters. Now that the US has acknowledged – seven years after the first men men arrived at Guantánamo – that it lacks evidence to try all but a handful, it should take them to the US mainland. After all, if it is safe to repatriate them, then it is safe to let them live in the US.

Since the first wire cages were set up at Camp X-Ray, only weeks after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Guantánamo’s melodramatic trappings have never been able to conceal the lack of legal justification for holding the prisoners there. The cages were replaced by concrete, but the doubts remained. I spent a week there in April 2006, attending the pretrial hearings of some of the first ten prisoners to be charged (after more than 600 had passed through the camp).

As one of their Pentagon-appointed lawyers said, they were small fry. The most important to be charged at that time had been Osama bin Laden’s former driver. Another had been picked up in a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was accused of going to a market to buy components that might have been used in a roadside bomb (never made, let alone detonated).

Of course, lack of evidence of serious crimes doesn’t mean that the accused are all charming people, full of goodwill to the US or its allies. Many have used their brief moments at the Guantánamo tribunals eloquently to lay out their loathing for the West. But it is still an affront to the US’s own principles to hold people without charge, or to devise new courts with new rules simply because that will secure a conviction.

This does not apply to the dozen or so “high-value” prisoners whom the US has brought to the camp in the past couple of years, headed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11 who has said that he wants to plead guilty to the charges. But even where the US has a solid case, against people allegedly guilty of the worst crimes, it has undermined its own position by torturing them, or subjecting them to practices deemed by some people to be torture.

There are many fronts in many wars – let’s put Afghanistan at the top – where the US can claim that it is pouring resources into a struggle that will help other countries, too; battles it cannot fight alone. But Guantánamo is its own mess, of its own elaborate construction and it should clear it up alone.

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