Obama's Commission Farce

So ... military commissions are back in vogue. I told everyone that civilian courts could not be used to trie terrorists. Now even Team Obama faces reality that trials in civilian courts equal letting terrorist go.

But the MSM does it's best to cover for Obama and faithfully parrots its talking points.

...this week's Obama administration Embarrassing Friday Night News Dump included alerting the Washington Post that the administration will be reinstating military commission trials for captured terrorists. Typical of the Obamedia, the Post uncritically accepts the administration's fig-leaf that Obama's new and improved commissions will correct flaws that made Bush commissions (approved by Congress in 2006) unfair, and therefore — so the claim goes — the reinstatement should not be considered a gargantuan flippero from the Obama campaign position that the commissions were a kangaroo-court of a travesty. So Post reporter Peter Finn tells us:

The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said. The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

This is utter nonsense. Under the existing commission rules, miltary judges have always had the authority to suppress evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, and have done so. Moreover, under Bush, the appointing authority (the Defense Department component that oversees the commissions) dismissed the charges against one of the most significant al-Qaeda detainees, Mohammed al-Qahtani, on the (absurd) ground that his interrogation was tantamount to torture.

Read the whole thing.