Both of the newspapers cautioned that none of the reports could be independently corroborated. But the stories emphasize the point I’ve been making for a while now that even if President Obama manages to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in the next several months (he’s already conceded he’s not going to meet his original January deadline), that’s not going to completely solve the United States’ image problem when it comes to prisoner mistreatment and abuse — because we still have Bagram.

Bagram has already been called “Obama’s Gitmo,” and “The Next Guantanamo” given that the administration is holding about 700 terror suspects there indefinitely without charge, with little meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention, no right to habeas corpus, and in conditions far more secretive than at Guantanamo Bay. We know that several detainees died from abuse at Bagram during the Bush administration, and conveniently, the Defense Department just stopped reporting detainee deaths in Afghanistan sometime in 2006.

So the latest reports of abuse shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Just last summer inmates were protesting their indefinite detention at Bagram, refusing to leave their cells or even speak to family members. That supposedly led to a military review and overhaul of the U.S. detention center in Afghanistan, and recently the United States opened a new and improved prison facility on the air base, designed to improve inmates’ living conditions and quiet some of the complaints. The former detainees interviewed by the Times and Post reporters may not have had the benefit of those reported improvements. But given the secrecy that still surrounds the Bagram facility and its inmates, and the fact that the wing of the prison operated by Special Operations forces is even more secretive and closed to the ICRC, the Obama administration is going to have a hard time answering these latest claims.

That’s just one of several sure-to-be-controversial recommendations the group makes in a new report released Tuesday.

CAP also wants the president to prosecute the suspected 9/11 conspirators in civilian federal courts, contrary to the calls of some lawmakers, like Senators Graham, Lieberman, McCain and others who insisted they be tried only in military commissions. (Their efforts to push through legislation to that effect failed last week.)

And, despite the fact that these five men are accused of the largest mass-murder ever on U.S. soil, CAP wants the president not to seek the death penalty for any of them. “It is in the strategic interests of the United States to deny these most heinous Al Qaeda terrorists what they want most: martyrdom,” writes Ken Gude, Associate Director of the International Rights and Responsibility Program and author of the new report.

As for the use of the military commissions that the president just revived by signing new legislation last week, those “remain tainted by Bush-era mistakes, and must be limited—if used at all—to battlefield crimes in order to gain a measure of legitimacy.”

Gude also recommends limiting military detention to actual enemy fighters captured in combat zones. Right now, the administration claims the right to seize and detain indefinitely suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban terrorists found anywhere in the world.

Those concerned that the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan is becoming “Obama’s Gitmo,” as it’s increasingly called, may not appreciate Gude’s final recommendation. While Gude would imprison anyone convicted in U.S. criminal courts in U.S. prisons, as we usually do, he recommends transferring anyone now at Guantanamo who will remain in military custody — either to be tried by a military commission or simply to be detained indefinitely — to the U.S.-run prison at Bagram.

While that might sound logical, particularly given the strong political objections to transferring Guantanamo detainees to the United States, civil and human rights advocates are likely to point out that it would not only allow the Obama administration to continue — indefinitely — the troubling practice of indefinite detention, but would place those indefinitely detained even further beyond the reach of U.S. courts than they were at Guantanamo. After all, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention through a writ of habeas corpus in federal courts; most Bagram detainees, on the other hand, do not have that right.

Advocates such as Human Rights First, which issued a new, highly critical report on the detention and trials of detainees in Afghanistan this month, have complained that the military procedures there don’t afford prisoners a meaningful way to challenge their detention. The report, based on interviews conducted in April, found that prisoners were often not informed of the specific reasons for their detention, were not provided with lawyers to represent them, and were not allowed to bring witnesses to speak on their behalf or challenge the evidence presented against them.

New detention review procedures implemented in September could solve some of those problems, although detainees still don’t get legal representation. In Gude’s view, while the administration “can and should do more,” Obama officials “are making good progress on procedures at Bagram.”  Ultimately, he says, the U.S. detention system there has to be better connected to Afghan law.

Whether we ought to be placing our hopes for due process and rule of law in the Afghan legal system, which suffers from plenty of its own serious problems, is a whole other question.

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.