NEOAVATARA

The OBAMA Military Tribunals

This is becoming a Friday night ritual.  For the second week in a row, the Obama Administration leaked ‘unpopular’ information regarding Gitmo on the weekend.  Wonder why…

Anyway.  Whatever.  The point is, Mr. Obama once called the Millitary Commissions Act ‘unconstitutional’.

What a difference a year makes.

The president, who during the election said, once elected, he would “reject the Military Commissions Act,” has encountered a hard, cold reality. In Obama’s case, his second thoughts about closing Guantanamo’s military commission system, which he once termed “an enormous failure”, arose after having reviewed the files of the 241 terrorists still held there.

The Washington Post is reporting that the President is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said. The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

One of Barack Obama’s first acts was to put off the tribunals for 120 days. They now plan to extend that suspension, which will end on May 20.

Liberals, of course, are outraged.  Human rights groups had interpreted the suspension as the death knell for military commissions and expected the transfer of cases to military courts martial or federal courts.  Guess they were wrong:  “This is an extraordinary development, and it’s going to tarnish the image of American justice again,” said Tom Parker, a counterterrorism specialist at Amnesty International.

“We’ll litigate this before they can proceed, absolutely,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Any effort to tinker with military commissions would be an enormous mistake. There is no way to fix a flawed process that has not rendered justice.”

Under the administration’s rule changes, hearsay evidence would be admissible if a judge determines it is reliable, officials said.  Romero said allowing hearsay in any U.S. courtroom is a “greater travesty than Bush administration justice.”

This is partly a decision made because of the failure of foreign policy.  Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had made it a priority to work with allies to move some of the prisoners overseas.  That process has failed miserably.  They were under the misconception that the Bush Administration did not try the same thing; they did, and had the same success rate.  But now, with the commissions restarting, getting any country to take prisoners will be almost impossible.  “This is going to greatly complicate the efforts of the administration to transfer people,” said Sarah Mendelson, the author of a report on Guantanamo Bay and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Frankly, this is the right decision.  The Obama administration’s plan to reinstate the commissions with modifications reflects the fear that some cases would fail in federal courts or in standard military legal settings.  The mistake was ever thinking that they could try these terrorists in a federal court.  It was unreasonable, foolish, and naive of Obama to think that way.  Obama actually made things worse by releasing the CIA memos last month.  That gives defense lawyers even more ammunition to release now Top Secret documents on their clients.  The Bush Administration had vehemently fought any release of information, fearing it would allow Al Qaeda to learn the U.S. methods of intelligence.  So by releasing the CIA memos, Obama has likely made it more difficult, if not impossible, to try these men in U.S. courts. 

What really bothers the left about this is not the commissions per se; it is the thought that Mr. Obama, on this issue, may have been wrong, while the evil George W. Bush may have been right.  Nothing strikes at the heart of liberals more than that.