Obama's Guantánamo, Counterterror Policies Similar to Bush's?

Washington - The debate over America's counterterrorism policies is sounding a lot like the debate over the Bush administration's aggressive "war on terror."

Former Afghan detainees pray during a press conference following their release from jail, in Kabul,...

Former Afghan detainees pray during a press conference following their release from jail, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in this June 2005 file photo. Whatever limited rights detainees at Guantanamo have under the U.S. Constitution, the Obama administration argued in a brief filed last night, they are not shared by detainees in Afghanistan.

(Shah Marai /AFP/Getty Images)

Nine months into the Obama administration, the same human rights and civil liberties officials who were sharply critical of President Bush are leveling similar criticisms about the new administration.

Although the rhetoric from the White House is toned down, harsh interrogations have stopped, and secret CIA prisons are shuttered, critics complain that emerging Obama antiterror policies seem more Bush-like than Obama-like.

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The administration has embraced Mr. Bush's law of war philosophy justifying the potential indefinite detention of terror suspects deemed by President Obama to be too difficult to put on trial, but also too dangerous to release.

Administration officials are hinting that Obama may fail to fulfill his pledge to close the Guantánamo prison camp by January. A new version of the controversial military commission process is expected to emerge soon from Congress. And construction continues for a new, expanded terror prison camp at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

"Bagram is becoming Obama's Guantánamo," Hope Metcalf, director of the National Litigation Project of the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, warned during a panel discussion in Washington Thursday.

"The situation at Bagram is, if anything, far worse than Guantánamo," she told a gathering of the American Constitution Society. "At Bagram, there are no lawyers, no courts, and essentially no hope."

Joanne Mariner, director of the counterterrorism program at Human Rights Watch, told the same assembly that the pace of detainee releases from Guantánamo has slowed from the rate during the Bush administration. Currently, 221 detainees remain at Guantánamo.

Of 38 Guantánamo habeas corpus cases in which judges had examined the government's evidence, 30 detainees had been ordered released, Ms. Mariner said. Of those, she said, only 12 have won actual freedom.