Remember the time of Bush? That was when the administration would ride roughshod over the legal rights that detainees should have been granted, and the courts would have to come along and slap the administration down.

That was then; this is now:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that prisoners in the war on terror can use U.S. civilian courts to challenge their detention at a military air base in Afghanistan, for the first time extending rights given to Guantanamo Bay detainees elsewhere in the world.

U.S. District Judge John Bates turned down the United States’ motion to deny the right to three foreign detainees at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year [in Boumediene] that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in court. But the government had argued that it did not apply to those in Afghanistan.

Bates said the cases were essentially the same. He quoted the Supreme Court ruling repeatedly in his judgment and applied the test created by it to each detainee. It is the first time a federal judge has applied the ruling to detainees in Afghanistan.

Welcome to Obama time! (The Obama administration, in a flawless baton change, has been resisting granting these legal rights to Bagram detainees in exactly the same way as the Bush administration resisted granting them to Guantanamo Bay detainees.)

Bates, by the way, is not exactly your garden-variety liberal activist judge. He was Deputy Independent Counsel for the Whitewater investigation from 1995 to mid-1997. Since February 2006, he has served as a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He was also nominated to the federal bench by George W. Bush.