Footnote to all that

I forgot one.

The Obama administration, siding with the Bush White House, contended [on February 20] that detainees in Afghanistan have no constitutional rights.

In a two-sentence court filing, the Justice Department said it agreed that detainees at Bagram Airfield cannot use U.S. courts to challenge their detention. ...

[F]our Afghan citizens being detained at Bagram tried to challenge their detentions in U.S. District Court in Washington. Court filings alleged that the U.S. military had held them without charges, repeatedly interrogating them without any means to contact an attorney. Their petition was filed by relatives on their behalf since they had no way of getting access to the legal system. ...

"They've now embraced the Bush policy that you can create prisons outside the law," said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union who has represented several detainees.

The Obama administration says Bagram is different from Gitmo and thus the prisoners at Bagram are not covered by last summer's Supreme Court ruling giving prisoners at Gitmo appeal rights because it's in a war zone and the prisoners are held as part of a military action.

But in that case, instead of being classified as so-called "enemy combatants," they should be regarded either as either POWs or civilian detainees with the protections of the Geneva Accords - among which is being free of inhumane treatment, rather than being beaten and tortured in a facility that is "worse than Guantánamo" and one which Obama is prepared to continue to shield from scrutiny.