Amanatullah is my client. For more than nine years, he has been held without charge by the United States military in a vast prison complex at Bagram Air Force Base, in Afghanistan. I have never met him.

Today, September 17th, I will try to convince a federal appeals court that some American court should review his case. The problem is that the United States government will not say why he was captured or what he is alleged to have done—only that he is detained because he meets the “criteria for detainability.” We also know that the government has cleared him for release. It just will not release him. The government will not say why he is cleared for release or why he has not been released. What it will say is that a United States court has no jurisdiction to undertake these inquiries.

What do we know about Amanatullah? We know that he is a Pakistani citizen, a rice merchant, from a village outside Faisalabad. In 2004, he went on a business trip to Iran (which imports rice from Pakistan) and crossed into Iraq to visit Shia shrines. We know that he disappeared and was not heard from for ten months, when his family learned that he had been detained by British forces in Iraq, handed over to American troops, and then flown to Afghanistan and jailed at Bagram. We know that he was registered originally under the wrong name, suggesting that this may be a case of mistaken identity. We know that, for nine years, he has been prohibited from speaking to a lawyer and permitted only a few telephone calls from his family. He has five children who have not seen him for nine years.

Why was Amanatullah brought to Afghanistan? Rendition of a prisoner from his place of capture to a third country is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, as is rendering someone to a war zone. Surely, there were plenty of places to detain him in Iraq. And there was a well-worn route for prisoners to be sent to Guantánamo Bay. Again, the government will not say.

We have succeeded in obtaining affidavits from two top-level Bush-era officials, the chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell and a senior C.I.A. official, both of whom have sworn that decisions as to where to detain prisoners were frequently driven by policy judgments about where they would have the fewest rights. And Amanatullah was sent to Bagram after the United States Supreme Court had decided in Rasul v. Bush that detainees at Guantánamo Bay had the right to bring habeas corpus proceedings in a United States court. The effort to create a complete legal black hole at Guantánamo had failed, and Bagram remained, in the government’s view, a last, best chance for holding detainees indefinitely without trial or judicial review.

Why won’t the government allow Amanatullah to have a habeas hearing? Because he is in a war zone, the government argued—the one to which it brought him. Because it could interfere with the war effort and divert military resources. Because a court telling the military what to do could diminish the prestige of the military in Afghanistan and bring aid and comfort to the enemy.

By any rational analysis, these are slogans rather than arguments based on facts. The military complex at Bagram is a huge fortress city, where Afghan detainees are being tried every day under the supervision and guidance of the U.S. military. Amanatullah, however, is not an Afghan, so he is maintained in a new, separately built facility for third-country nationals. If Amanatullah were given a habeas hearing, it would not divert the war effort; one could argue that if there’s a distraction, it’s his detention. Bagram is run not by combat units but by a joint task force, whose job it is to run the prison and court complex. And a habeas hearing would focus on what Amanatullah allegedly did in Iraq, information presumably known to the British troops in Iraq who detained him and kept on a Pentagon system database.

Will the prestige of the military be diminished if a United States court accords basic human rights and dignity to a rice merchant from Pakistan? Will the freeing of an innocent man through the Great Writ give aid and comfort to the enemy? I would suggest that providing Amanatullah with his day in a United States court, even at this late date, would achieve just the opposite.

Eric Lewis is a partner at Lewis Baach, an international litigation firm based in Washington, D.C.

Photograph by Larry Downing/Reuters/Corbis.