What Obama Isn’t Going to Change About Military Commissions (Jeremy R. Hammond)

[Tace]

President Barack Obama stands before the U.S. Constitution at the National Archives to give a speech in which he outlined his policy towards Guantanamo detainees (Pete Souza/White House)

Obama’s proposed revisions to the military commissions pretty much exemplify his administration’s rather limited conception of what “change” means for the foreign policy of the United States.

Jeremy R. Hammond -- World News Trust

May 22, 2009 -- President Barack Obama reiterated in a speech Thursday that he would continue with the Bush administration’s policy of trying prisoners of the U.S. “war on terror” not in the Federal court system, but through military commissions, which he described as “an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war.”

Obama criticized the Bush administration’s use of the commissions, however, and announced that his administration would make several changes. “We will no longer permit the use … as evidence statements that have been obtained using cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods”, he said.

“We will no longer place the burden to prove that hearsay is unreliable on the opponent of the hearsay. And we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel, and more protections if they refuse to testify.”

Obama’s plan is to use military commissions to try detainees held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which he has ordered closed by the end of the year.

The first problem with Obama’s continuation of Bush’s policy, albeit a “kinder, gentler” version of it, to borrow Glenn Greenwald’s tongue-in-cheek description, is that “the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves,” as Greenwald observed last week.

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/wnt-reports/commentary/what-obama-isn%E2%80%99t-going-to-change-about-military-commissions-jeremy-r.-hammond.html

[mikita]

1. thanks for posting this...

great article.