WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s decision Friday to revive military tribunals to try terrorism suspects will likely fail to erase the taint of illegitimacy over the courts, civilian and military legal experts said.
Obama outlined five rule changes aimed at bolstering defendants’ rights, including strict limits on the use of coerced evidence, tougher restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence and more latitude for defendants to choose their lawyers.
Still, experts said the tribunals, also known as military commissions, are seen as so flawed that no amount of improvement will be able to dispel impressions that they are rigged to deliver convictions.
“I believe that the rules and procedures can be fixed so as to provide an actual fair proceeding. But what I don’t think they can salvage is the perception that the commissions are an illegitimate and unfair process,” said Maj. David Frakt, a Western State University law professor who represents two prisoners held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
During the presidential campaign, Obama criticized the commissions as an “enormous failure” and said he would prefer to try detainees in federal courts or in traditional military courts.
But on Friday, he announced that the trials of 13 defendants in nine cases will be restarted, though no sooner than September.
“To make the commissions truly fair and equitable, they would have to be so fundamentally reconfigured that I just don’t really understand how they can go forward,” said Amos Guiora, a national-security law professor at the University of Utah.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs defended the administration’s decision to resume the tribunals, saying that “first and foremost, the president of the United States is going to do what he believes is in the best security interests of the people of the United States.”
