President Obama has decided to keep the military commission system that his predecessor created to try suspected terrorists but will ask Congress to expand the rights of defendants to contest the charges against them, officials briefed on the plan said Thursday.
According to another article in the New York Times, the upgraded military commissions "would limit the use of hearsay, ban evidence gained from cruel treatment, give defendants more latitude to pick their own lawyers and provide more protection if they do not testify."
Despite the "revamped" commissions this raises questions, and on the heels of decisions to repress photographs depicting torture it appears that the President may not be making as clean a break from the Bush Administration policies as he promissed during the campaigned. Beyond the civil rights issues of the decision to continue the military commissions there are political issues. President Obama has made it clear that he intends to shut down the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, however, as of yet there is no clear plan to how it will be shut down and what will happen with the detainees. Congress has already denied the $80 million that the President has requested to fund closing Guantanamo, and there is increasing political pressure not to allow detainees to be transferred to the United States.
The Republicans in Congress has spent much of the last few weeks promoting the idea that if Guantanamo is closed that detainees will be released in the United States. The continued promotion of the generalization that all of the detainees in Guantanamo are the very same people that attacked the United States on September 11th is ridiculous. Also, there has been the continued use of the debunked idea that there are significant amounts of former Guantanamo detainees that are returning to the battlefield. Since the Bush Administrations characterization of the detainees as the "worst of the worst" any realistic approach to how to legally deal with those detained in Guantanamo by has been largely replaced by fear inducing rhetoric.
Although, mainly because of their own rhetoric, there is not a congressman (or possibly elected official for that matter) who wants detainees to be held in their state or district. The town of Hardin, Montana lobbied to have the detainees sent to the newly built and empty prison, Two Rivers Detention Facility. The Montana congressional delegation baulked at the idea of having detainees transferred to the state they represented. According to an article in Time, Democrat Senator Max Baucus said "we're not going to bring al-Qaeda to Big Sky Country." Since February Texas lawmakers have been lobbying not to allow detainees to be transferred to Texas or to another other state. Republican Congressman Lamar Smith said that lawmakers will do whatever possible to "prevent the transfer or release of known terrorists into the neighborhoods and communities of Texas."
What this really says is that there is a lack of trust in the United States justice system, and it also suggests that the commissions may be the only way to actually convict many of the detainees of anything. Despite the fact that the Bush Administration has done anything and everything possible to make it difficult to impossible to prosecute terrorist under United States law, it is important that terrorist be brought to justice in a real court room, not a con-mission. Congressman Peter King suggested that the very idea of having a terrorist standing trial within walking distance of the September 11th terrorist attacks is "offensive" and "dangerous." When it concerns prosecuting the detainees that were involved in terrorist activities; there is no more fitting place than in the shadow of ground zero.
