ACLU: Military Commissions Can’t Be Fixed

The Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on military commissions is underway. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) is making an opening statement about how the commissions were subject to a “double failure” to uphold “basic principles of justice” under the previous congress and the Bush administration, particularly with regard to allowing hearsay evidence. But the Senate panel’s “new language” on commissions would no longer make “coerced statements … admissible if they’re obtained prior to December 2005,” Levin said. (That’s when Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act passed, an attempt to bar torture by the military.) And detainees would no longer have the burden of providing hearsay evidence is unreliable.

But the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chris Anders disagrees that the commissions can be salvaged. In a new statement, Anders says:

“President Obama put an end to the use of torture and abuse because he knew that it was contrary to our most fundamental values. Yet the president and Congress are now considering allowing forced confessions – the fruit of some of those very same practices – to be used against defendants,” said Anders. “Under the new legislation, involuntary confessions forced out of witnesses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and other torture sites could be used to convict people. Due process cannot exist when we allow hearsay and coerced evidence in our courtrooms, and justice cannot exist without due process. The military commissions must be shut down for good if America is to repair its legacy as an international beacon of human rights and civil liberties.”