and the right to meet with and be represented by lawyers, none of these privileges had been extended to the prisoners in Bagram. Their isolation meant that, increasingly, the prison in Afghanistan -- which was, and is, under the complete control of the US military -- was nothing less than Guantnamo's Dark Mirror, or, as Judge Bates suggested in a review of the men's cases in January, "a 'black hole' for detainees in a 'law-free zone.'" At the time, Judge Bates was only hinting that he thought it might be necessary to extend habeas rights to these particular prisoners in Bagram. In February, of course, the Obama administration thought that it had crushed his nascent dissent, when it declared, with an imperiousness that was reminiscent of Dick Cheney and David Addington , that the reach of the law did not extend to Bagram. However, last Thursday, after studying closely the differences between the prisoners held at Bagram -- in other words, between foreigners captured in other countries and "rendered" to Bagram, Afghans captured in other countries and "rendered" to Bagram, and Afghans captured in Afghanistan -- Judge Bates ruled ( PDF ) that the habeas rights granted by the Supreme Court to the Guantnamo prisoners last June in Boumediene v. Bush also extended to the foreign prisoners in Bagram, because, as he explained succinctly, "the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same." What this involved, to recap on Boumediene , was that the government