Recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that detainees being held by the United States Military at the United States Military facility at Bagram, Afghanistan cannot challenge the legality of their detention through habeas corpus. Bagram Air Base is, as one editorial put it, a legal black hole. Sound familiar? That is probably because the same court also held that habeas corpus is not available for detainees at the American military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that decision in Boumedienne v. Bush. In fact, the DC Circuit Court has been repeatedly reversed in its rulings on the rights of detainees. The recent decision about Bagram helpfully recapitulates that history of reversal, though unfortunately awareness of its own history of error was not accompanied by a change in attitude towards the most basic rights of detainees--the right to understand and challenge the basis of detention.
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