Pat Dollard

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Earlier this week, after Obama, with a chastened but angry countenance, declared that he had changed his mind and would not release the so-called CIA torture photos, the question was raised, “Did the military leadership, including Odierno and Petraeus, threaten him with mass resignations if he did so? And now he’s backpedaling on the Gitmo trials, reinstating George Bush’s military tribunal policy.

Have we just witnessed a U.S. military policy coup?

Times Online:

Barack Obama is set to reverse the first formal decision of his presidency today with the expected announcement that his Administration will restart Bush-era military tribunals for Guantánamo Bay detainees.

While still on the campaign trail, Mr Obama denounced the military commission system as “flawed”. He suspended them within hours of his inauguration in January, pending a review of the alternatives, and promised to close the detention camp on Cuba.

His decision to restart the tribunals – albeit with must stronger legal safeguards for defendants – has prompted protests from human rights groups while showing how difficult it is for Mr Obama to break completely with the policies of his predecessor.

Administration officials confirmed yesterday that the new legal framework, to be used for the trials of only the most prominent a-Qaeda suspects now at Guantánamo Bay, would include restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence against detainees.

The revisions would also reportedly ban evidence obtained through coercion, such as waterboarding and other enhanced CIA interrogation techniques.

The move would affect, among others, five detainees charged with having played key roles in the attacks of September 11, 2001, including the plot’s self-proclaimed mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Republicans have fiercely assailed Mr Obama’s order to close Guantánamo Bay by late January next year, and Democrats have rejected a White House funding request to shutter the prison.

The camp, synonymous around the world with the excesses of Mr Bush’s “war on terror”, still holds 241 inmates from 30 different countries, according to the Pentagon.

For weeks, Republicans have attacked Mr Obama for ordering the facility’s closure and the suspension of military commissions, saying the President did not have a plan for what to do with the prisoners.

Senator John McCain, who spearheaded legislation creating the commissions, said such trials were the only adequate venue for trying suspected terrorists and that he was working with the White House on a way forward.

One Obama Administration official said that the President had consistently backed military commissions as an option to try detainees, but believed the version used by the Bush Administration did not have sufficient safeguards to ensure due process. That system only convicted three detainees in eight years.

Some rights groups have called on the Administration to prosecute al-Qaeda detainees in the regular US court system, but opponents have warned that evidence, possibly obtained under coercion, would not stand up. US Department of Justice memos released in April revealed that Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month.

“The Obama Administration shouldn’t tinker with a fundamentally flawed system,” said Stacy Sullivan, counter-terrorism adviser for Human Rights Watch (HRW). “Reviving the military commissions would strip much of the meaning from closing Guantánamo.”

Tom Parker of Amnesty International said the President would be making “a disastrous misstep” if he revived the commissions after blasting them as “an enormous failure” on the campaign trail last year.

Some of Mr Obama’s liberal backers have already registered outrage this week after the President decided to try to block the release of more photos of abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan at US facilities, fearing they could expose American troops to reprisals abroad.

That decision, critics have argued, has thrown into question Mr Obama’s promised new era of transparency and respect for the rule of law.

David Axelrod, one of the President’s closest advisers, countered that Mr Obama’s “positions on transparency and public disclosure are strong and well known.

“But they’re not without limit,” he said.