The Obama administration has fought against that position, insisting that none of the prisoners held by U.S. forces at the Bagram air base have any constitutional rights. The Justice Department asked for the right to immediately appeal the decision to the court of appeals.

The judge granted that request on Monday on the grounds that the case presents “substantial grounds for difference of opinion” meriting an appeal, and “fundamental constitutional questions” that weigh in favor of staying the case — and delaying any action in favor of the detainees — until the appeal is decided.

The lawyers for the detainees were dismayed. “At this point, there can be no doubt that despite President Obama’s rhetoric regarding the closure of Guantanamo, his administration claims the right to use Bagram to imprison people indefinitely and deny them human rights,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, which represents the Bagram detainees, in a prepared statement. “It’s an outrage that rather than let our clients have their day in court, this administration has chosen instead to defend and perpetuate Bush administration policies.”

U.S. District Court Judge John Bates ruled that the four men — all foreign nationals captured by U.S. forces outside Afghanistan and sent there to be incarcerated at a prison on the U.S.-run Bagram air base — have the same rights as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who were similarly sent there by U.S. forces from other countries.

As I’ve written before, the Bagram prison — which is fast turning into Obama’s Gitmo — has many of the same attributes as the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. That’s just what the lawyers for the four detainees there argued.  Although the Obama administration had, like the Bush administration before it, argued forcefully that Bagram detainees have no constitutional rights and therefore no rights to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, Bates — a conservative judge appointed by former President George W. Bush — today disagreed.

“The writ of habeas corpus plays a central role in our constitutional system as conceived by the Framers,” wrote Judge Bates. “Indeed, ‘the Framers deemed the writ to be an essential mechanism in the separation-of-powers scheme,’ ” he wrote, quoting the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Boumediene v. Bush, which gave Guantanamo detainees habeas corpus rights, “that, as Alexander Hamilton observed, was vital to the protection of individuals against the very same arbitrary exercise of the government’s power to detain that is alleged by petitioners here.”

Although all four of the detainees in the case were captured outside Afghanistan and have been held at Bagram for more than six years, Bates ruled that one of the men, who is an Afghan citizen, may not be entitled to habeas corpus review because of the “practical obstacles in the form of friction with the host country.” He ordered the lawyers to file additional briefs with the court addressing those issues.

“The strategy as announced is encouraging,” said Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, which represents Bagram detainees seeking habeas corpus relief in federal court, told me today. “Of course, we’ve seen from President Obama in the past that encouraging words and pronouncements don’t necessarily translate into actions consistent with those words.”

Foster was referring to the fact that President Obama, despite promising to close Guantanamo Bay and improve U.S. detention policies, has kept up the Bush administration’s argument that detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan have no habeas corpus rights — or any other constitutional rights, for that matter.

Bagram therefore has the potential to become, as I’ve written before, Obama’s Gitmo — and actually, far worse.  That’s because while there are about 240 detainees at Guantanamo, there are more than 600 at Bagram. And a surge of troops and a stepped-up U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, as President Obama is promising, will likely add many more prisoners to their ranks.

“I’m encouraged by the fact that the Afghan strategy recognizes the importance of the civilian population at the local level,” said Foster, who’s one of very few U.S.-based lawyers that have actually been to Afghanistan to try to see the prisoners and meet with their families. (The U.S. military does not allow its prisoners at Bagram to meet with lawyers, so she’s been able to see only those prisoners who have been released.)

“But he has to change the policy with respect to prisoners at Bagram, otherwise there will be no credibility for all of these new civilian and military forces being sent to partner with the local population in Afghanistan to build a new society,” said Foster. “If at the same  the U.S. is illegally detaining hundreds of Afghan civilians without legal basis, that has to change in order to have credibility.”

“There’s a large section of the Afghan population that would prefer to go back to the Taliban because since the U.S. invasion things have been so horrible and they’ve suffered so much,”  she added. “So you have to show some progress. Time is running out.”

The Obama administration’s commitment to working with the Afghan population to support their nation’s development ought to include extending to prisoners at Bagram the right to meaningfully challenge their detention — to make sure the U.S. military is at least holding the right people this time.

As I explained in my story yesterday, key to the government’s case that it’s entitled to keep holding the men indefinitely is that they were “captured on the battlefield” and are therefore “enemy combatants” whom the U.S. government may hold until it has declared hostilities are over.  The petitioners in the habeas corpus cases heard yesterday, however, were all captured in different countries and sent to the Bagram prison in Afghanistan, where they have remained without charge or access to lawyers for years.  Many prisoners at Bagram claim they’ve been beaten, tortured and humiliated by U.S. authorities. At least two prisoners at Bagram were beaten to death during interrogations.

Bates yesterday ordered the government to provide the following information:

• The number of detainees currently being held in Bagram Prison;
• The number of Bagram detainees who are Afghan citizens; and
• The number of Bagram detainees who were not captured in Afghanistan.

This suggests he’s at least taking a hard look at the government’s claim that the suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers imprisoned at Bagram are all battlefield captures. If they’re not, that supports the prisoners’ claims that they’re entitled to the same habeas corpus rights as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Last June, the Supreme Court affirmed that, contrary to the government’s arguments, prisoners at Gitmo are entitled to challenge the legitimacy of their detention in U.S. courts.