Ten years ago this month, I got a call from the Pentagon asking whether I would like to go to Cuba. Pack an overnight bag, I was told, bring some binoculars and get yourself to Roosevelt Roads naval base in Puerto Rico to await a flight to the American enclave.

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp had been in operation for two weeks and Donald Rumsfeld had decided the time had come to show it to the rest of the world. As the UK was America's closest ally in Afghanistan, British media went first, and a handful of Fleet Street hacks found ourselves on an old Pan Am charter bound for Guantanamo Bay.

The next day we discovered what the binoculars were for. We were taken by boat to the windward side of the bay and driven up to a small bluff overlooking Camp X-Ray, the first version of the Guantanamo prison. We could go no closer than an observation line on the top of the hillock, exactly 100 yards from the perimeter wire.

The idea of us being there was to demonstrate that Guantanamo really was the "least worst place" to put the "worst of the worst", as Rumsfeld put it. But, as so often with the battle of perceptions in the "war on terror", the plan backfired. The spectacle looked like something out of The Bridge on the River Kwai. This is what I wrote at the time:

From 100 yards - the closest civilians are allowed to venture - Camp X-Ray looks like a particularly densely packed zoo, its 2.5 metre cages arranged in tight metal blocks and its inmates all but invisible except for the occasional flash of orange through the wire.

With the help of binoculars, some of the detainees could be seen slumped motionless in the corner of their pens. The only apparent sign of life was on the west side of the cell block where the prisoners were trying to fix their sheets to the chain-link walls of their cages to take the edge off the intense evening sun, and arguing with the guards, who wanted to keep them in sight, over how high they could hang their makeshift blinds.

In six plywood watchtowers positioned along the outer ring of two perimeter fences, snipers trained their rifles on these encounters, as if the detainees might at any moment break through the wire with their bare hands and mount a mutiny.

Elspeth Van Veeren, a research fellow at Sussex University who is writing a book about Guantanamo, says Rumsfeld's Pentagon came to rue the publication of those early photographs a decade ago. She says:

The orange-clad, hooded Guantánamo detainee is a globally recognised figure used to symbolise abuse and torture. This image has become a visual shorthand for any manner of practices and locations where abuse is alleged, and will be with us for a while.

As the Obama administration is discovering, the early rhetoric surrounding Guantanamo has held successive US governments hostage. No distinction was made between al-Qaida and the Taliban, and the American public has not been prepared to have people they were told were "the worst of the worst" transferred to penitentiaries in their county or state.

Going one step further, Congress has blocked the transfer of inmates to custody in other countries, which was the Bush and Obama administrations' plan for winding the prison camp down. The latest National Defence Authorisation Act, (NDAA) passed over Christmas, extends the ban on transfers for another year, and codifies the indefinite military detention of suspected terrorists without trial, the exact opposite of what Obama set out to achieve.

The NDAA also ties Obama's hands when it comes to drawing the Taliban into peace talks. The insurgents have agreed to open an office in Qatar for the purpose of negotiations, but are unlikely to take the next step and start talking without a handful of prisoner transfers.

There is one possible way around this. Under the NDAA, the defence secretary, Leon Panetta, could issue a certificate promising that the transferred detainees would not return to terrorism. That could be doable under some kind of Qatar-supervised custody while talks are underway, and until some kind of general ceasefire is agreed.

It would be a high-risk gambit with only a slight chance of a comprehensive deal at the end of it, especially in an election year. But the opening has presented itself now, and Obama cannot really afford to wait through another year of fighting if he wants to extricate his nation from the Afghan war.