Bagram has been seriously and totally messed up for years, despite US denials of foul play. Numerous reports and documentaries talk about the horrors that go on there. I was so excited last week when the NYTimes recently reported on the Obama administration's plans to implement new (read: any) rights for detainees at Bagram:

The new Pentagon guidelines would assign a United States military official to each of the roughly 600 detainees at the American-run prison at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. These officials would not be lawyers but could for the first time gather witnesses and evidence, including classified material, on behalf of the detainees to challenge their detention in proceedings before a military-appointed review board.

Some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as six years. And unlike the prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba, these detainees have had no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

An article from Al-Jazeera English quoted Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York and attorney for a Bagram detainee, who said the move is just "window dressing".

"The whole thing was meant to pull the wool over the eyes of the judicial system,'' he told The Associated Press.

"These changes don't come anywhere near an adequate substitute for a real review."

Whatever I was still pumped about even the beginnings of a change until yesterday I read this in an ACLU press release:

The Obama administration has filed a brief with a federal appeals court in Washington arguing that the approximately 600 detainees in U.S. custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are not entitled to have their cases heard in U.S. courts. Some of the detainees at Bagram have been held for up to six years with no meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention, and there are some prisoners there who are unconnected to the war in Afghanistan but who have been sent there from locations around the world.

WHY OBAMA WHY. I don't understand the madness. Is there any way to stop dehumanizing people? I am interested specifically in how the law systematically dehumanizes people and deprives them of their rights - I've been thinking about that a lot at my job at the NY Legal Assistance Group and as I'm studying for the LSATs. The law doesn't seem to account for humanity, and indeed seems to try to mask legal rights in obscure language and self-referential textual codes that prevent anyone from understanding a) how few rights they actually have and b) what those rights that they do have are. Is there a way to be a radical lawyer? Is there a way to redistribute information and access? Is it worthwhile or meaningful if it's to a system that is deeply flawed??