Obama Revives Military Trials at Guantanamo

Source: New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama brought back Bush-era military trials for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday by signing new rules into law that will give detainees stronger legal rights in court.

Obama approved the new rules -- most of which he proposed in May -- as part of a $680 billion defense policy bill that cut some pricey and overlapping military weapons programs.

Obama did not mention Guantanamo during a short White House ceremony in which he signed the defense bill.

More than 220 detainees remain at Guantanamo as the Obama administration decides how to prosecute some in U.S. courts and turns over others to nations that are willing to rehabilitate or free them. Additionally, the administration is grappling with how to keep in prison a small handful of remaining detainees who are considered too dangerous to release or put on trial.

The new rules for military commissions replace a system for Guantanamo trials that was put in place during the Bush administration. The old system limited detainees' legal rights to defend themselves at trial, in part by allowing the use of hearsay and coerced statements to be used against them.

Civil rights and constitutional law advocates said the changes that they called improvements still fall far short of guaranteeing detainees' rights.

Jameel Jaffer, a national security attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said the new system still lets the military prosecute a broader group of detainees than U.S. and international law allows. It also does not prohibit the prosecution of children in military trials.

''The Obama administration has committed to closing the prison at Guantanamo, but closing the prison will have little meaning if the administration leaves in place the policies that the prison has come to represent,'' Jaffer said in a statement. ''The commissions remain not only illegal but unnecessary.''

more: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/10/28/us/politics/AP-US-Guantanamo-Detainees.html

too much.

I'm sure more will develop in the upcoming months until January.

no funding so he cant set them all free or review their status to determine prosecution.

then that created such a shitstorm there's no choice but to leave them there for trial or whatever.

but he has his hands tied on this. He pledged to shut Guantanamo down and then that plan was basically shot down in part, by members of his own party, afraid of having "terrorists in the neighborhoods". Granted, no one really was able to tell how or why these men would be any more dangerous than the thousands of serial killers and rapists and assorted scum already in MAXIMUM SECURITY prisons. Not to mention, the FBI has successfully prosecuted previous terrorists.

At least we can see here that Obama actually wants to maintain some semblance of a judicial system in Guantanamo.

... what a mess there is to clean up.

Hekate

impossible as we feared back when it all went wrong.