Obama revives military commissions

The Obama administration announced that it would resume trials of Guantanamo detainees by military commissions, albeit under new rules that would offer defendants greater legal protections. The additional rules prohibit the introduction of evidence obtained through cruel treatment, tighten the rules on hearsay evidence, and allow detainees greater choice in selecting defense lawyers. While the revised commissions improve somewhat on the model used by the Bush administration, they still fall far short of providing the due process guarantees found in U.S. federal courts.
Critics argue that trying detainees in the US federal court system would endanger "national security", as usual. But the federal court system also has a long history of providing fair trials in difficult cases. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Zacarias Moussaoui, implicated in the 9/11 attacks, were both tried and convicted in the federal courts. During the seven-year period when military commissions prosecuted three terrorism suspects, the federal courts tried more than 145 terrorism cases.