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The Washington Post reports that “[h]undreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week”:

The new system will be applied to the more than 600 Afghans held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration. …

Under the new rules, each detainee will be assigned a U.S. military official, not a lawyer, to represent his interests and examine evidence against him. In proceedings before a board composed of military officers, detainees will have the right to call witnesses and present evidence when it is “reasonably available,” the official said. …

Most Bagram detainees are Afghans, considered battlefield prisoners taken in a war zone. An unspecified number, said to be fewer than 30, are non-Afghans, many of them captured in other countries.

Thanks to a law signed by President Hamid Karzai in the run-up to the tainted election, Afghan terrorists and enemy combatants now have more rights than Afghan women, who must remain in indefinite detention in their own homes until their husband or father gives them permission to leave (sixth item). Needless to say, these women are powerless under Sharia law to question their imprisonment, and cannot fight for their habeas corpus rights in any U.S. civilian or military court.