You won’t hear me defend for a second accusations that Obama is his predecessor with a Hope-and-Change-y makeover, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some areas where their views overlap to a disturbing degree. And while Obama has firmly denounced torture, doing so is only the bare minimum required for human decency; that alone doesn’t make for a solid record on civil liberties. In fact, as of this week, his record in that department looks to be pretty damn shitty.

That’s because Obama is canceling out whatever good karma he garnered in taking steps to close Guantanamo by manuevering to turn Bagram Air Base into the new Guantanamo. Does that mean detainees will be tortured there? No. But fighting to make sure those same detainees remain stripped of all their legal rights is a stunning abuse of power on its own.

At the same time, the rules the White House is proposing for Bagram are a slight improvement over what existed under the Bush administration. But it’s a testament to the remarkable leadership of George W. Bush that Obama’s guidelines can be a slight improvement and still an affront to the Constitution. Explanation below the fold.

Here’s the thing: under the Bush administration, detainees at Bagram had absolutely no legal recourse whatsoever, whereas Obama ostensibly seeks to restore some basic, rudimentary rights. So what’s the problem? Nothing, except that habeas corpus still gets tossed out the window.

The Obama administration’s new plan for dealing with detainees is roughly equivalent to Guantanamo’s CSRT system, in which prisoners were put before a makeshift military tribunal (not a civilian court). They were not there to protest the accusations made against them; only to be evaluated as a potential danger to the country’s national security. This is the system that, when used at Guantanamo, was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush.

Now Obama’s Justice Department is making basically the same argument that Bush’s did: the program is legal because Bagram detainees have no habeas corpus rights. Which, given that they’re civilians accused of terrorism, and most assuredly not soldiers of another sovereign nation, is something they are legally entitled to.

Photo by Flickr user DVIDSHUB used under a Creative Commons license.