A leading human rights lawyer said he expected Guantanamo Bay prison to close when US President George W Bush leaves office, but points out there are still 14,000 prisoners held by the United States in secret jails around the world.
'Guantanamo has achieved a huge amount - all bad', said Clive Stafford Smith who criss-crosses the Atlantic trying to liberate detainees from the US prison on Cuba.
He says cooks, shopkeepers and television cameramen were tortured into admitting they worked for Osama bin Laden.
The US is holding 380 foreign terrorism suspects at the camp, which it opened in 2002.
Their indefinite detention has provoked widespread international criticism while US efforts to establish a system to try them have run into legal obstacles.
Stafford Smith said most of the 14,000 prisoners in secret jails have been in Iraq.
The Bush administration was forced to rewrite the rules over Guantanamo last year after the US Supreme Court deemed the old tribunals illegal.
And in the latest twist this month, judges decided the fact that two defendants had been designated 'enemy combatants' was not enough to try them by military commission.
'That was just another nail in the coffin for Guantanamo', Mr Stafford Smith said.
The lawyer believes 'Guantanamo will definitely close and I think as soon as the current incumbent of the White House is out of office.'
