How Obama Learned To Love Military Commissions

The Obama administration sought and received from Congress additional reforms to commissions to disallow certain evidence obtained from coercion, to make it harder for the government to use hearsay evidence, and to give detainees more freedom to choose attorneys. These reforms were not big changes from the earlier congressional effort, but they increased the reliability of rulings and gave commissions a second, bipartisan stamp of congressional approval.?Congress yet again gave these bodies its approval in the 2011 defense authorization law?approval that, unsurprisingly, mirrors widespread support for commissions by the American people.

Today, the Obama administration is deploying commissions aggressively.?It has secured four convictions in the past three years. That is more than the Bush administration won in the previous seven years. And it restarted the process of trying senior al-Qaida officials responsible for the 9/11 attacks?a process delayed by Attorney General Holder's failed attempt to try them in civilian court.

The commissions, of course, still have critics who question their fairness and effectiveness. But the results emerging from commissions belie these criticisms. One indicator of commissions? fairness is that their sentences for convictions have been lower than in similar cases in civilian courts.?One indicator of their usefulness is that al-Qaida operative Majid Khan recently pled guilty to several crimes in exchange for a 25-year sentence and an agreement to testify against senior al-Qaida figures in future commission trials. The Obama administration is even considering using military commissions to prosecute a non-al-Qaida operative, Hezbollah-linked Ali Musa Daqduq, who is currently in Iraqi custody accused of organizing attacks on American soldiers in Iraq.

The revival and acceptance of military commissions is a happy development in the long war against Islamist terrorists. These commissions provide the president with a third tool for terrorist incapacitation in addition to civilian trials (which have evidentiary rules that are sometimes too demanding for battlefield captures, and which in any event Congress has banned for GITMO terrorists) and military detention (which many believe is too lax in its criteria for indefinite incapacitation).

The revival of commissions is also a testament to the underappreciated success of our constitutional system in the last decade.?That system pushed President Bush to accept a more rigorous commission system than he wanted.?Along the way, it legitimated commissions in ways that President Obama, contrary to his initial inclination, found difficult to resist.?Neither president got what he wanted. But as Holder's powerful endorsement indicates, commissions now enjoy widespread political and legal support, and they finally seem to be working.

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=05622b1969133ea83e03b784b784d2ce

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