In the Bush era, those of us who followed his administration's torture, detention and interrogation policies often felt like unwilling participants in a perverse game of hide-and-seek. Whenever one of us stumbled on a startling new document, a horrific new practice, a dismal new prison environment, or yet another individual implicated in torture policy, the feeling of revelation would soon be superseded by a sneaking suspicion that we were once again looking in the wrong direction, that the Bush administration was playing a Machiavellian game of distraction with us.

OK, call it paranoia -- a state of mind well suited to the Age of Cheney -- but when Abu Ghraib finally came to light, it turned out that our real focus should have been on the administration's program of "extraordinary rendition" and the secret CIA flights to the countries that were serving as proxy torturers for the United States. And when one case of torture by proxy, that of Maher Arar, achieved some prominence, we began looking at proxy torturers for the United States, when we should have been looking at legalized policies of torture by the U.S.

Several years ago, the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith placed that jewel in the Bush administration's offshore crown of injustice, Guantánamo, in the category of distraction as well -- distraction, that is, from the far grimmer and more important American detention facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

....What ever happened to the U.S. prison at Bagram?

It turns out that we can say very little with precision or confidence about that prison facility or even the exact number of prisoners there. News sources had often reported approximately 500 to 600 prisoners in custody at Bagram, but an accurate count is not available. A federal judge recently asked for "the number of detainees held at Bagram Air Base; the number of Bagram detainees who were captured outside Afghanistan; and the number of Bagram detainees who are Afghan citizens," but the information the Obama administration offered the court in response remains classified and redacted from the public record.

We don't even know the exact size of the prison or much about the conditions there, although they have been described as more Spartan and far cruder than Guantánamo's in its worst days. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have visited the prison, but it remains unclear whether they were able to inspect all of it. A confidential Red Cross report from 2008 supposedly highlighted overcrowding, the use of extreme isolation as a punishment technique, and various violations of the Geneva Convention.

We do know that a planned expansion of the facility is under way and will -- if President Obama chooses to continue the Bush project there -- enable up to 1,100 prisoners to be held (a step that will grimly complement the "surge" in American troops now under way in Afghanistan). There are no figures available on how long most of Bagram's prisoners have been held -- although some, it seems, have been imprisoned without charges or recourse for years -- or how legal processes are being applied there, if at all. Last spring, the International Herald Tribune reported that Afghans from Bagram were sometimes tried in Afghan criminal proceedings where little evidence and no witnesses were presented.

To students of Guantánamo, this sounds uncomfortably familiar. And there's more that's eerily reminiscent of Gitmo's bleak history. According to the New York Times, even four years after Bagram was established, wire cages were being used as cells, with buckets for toilets -- as was also true of the original conditions at Camp X-Ray, the first holding facility at Guantánamo. Similarly, as with Guantánamo, the U.S. has no status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan, and so the base and prison can be closed or turned over to the Afghans only on U.S. say-so. Above all, while some Bagram detainees have lawyers, most do not.

While I was wondering about the state of our black hole of incarceration in Afghanistan, the Obama administration issued its first terse statement on the subject. When it came to granting four Bagram detainees habeas rights (that is, the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts), the administration simply stated that it "adheres to [the Justice Department's] previously articulated position": Habeas would not be granted.

After all, reasoned the new government lawyers (like their predecessors), Bagram is in an indisputable war zone and different legal considerations should apply. But here's the catch neither the Bush administration, nor evidently the Obama administration, has cared to consider: It's quite possible that these four individuals, like others at Bagram, were not captured on an Afghan battlefield (as the prisoners claim), but elsewhere on what Bush officials liked to think of as the "global battlefield" of the war on terror, and then conveniently transported to Bagram to be held indefinitely.