...Khan’s attorney, J. Wells Dixon of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, explained that he read the judge’s decision as also “open[ing] the door to a claim that Mr. Khan was denied due process because he was not given access to a lawyer in his first year at Guantánamo.” He called the opinion “a recognition of the universal prohibition on torture that exists throughout all bodies of law, including the military commissions at Guantánamo,” and noted that the judge had quoted William Blackstone, described by Rosenberg as “the 18th-century British jurist whose treatises are a foundation of American law,” and who averred that, “in the dubious interval” between capture, detention and trial, “a prisoner ought to be used with the utmost humanity.” ...

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