Word: hamdan
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...this time, not at the hands of any civilian judges but by the ruling of one of the military's own jurists. Navy Judge Captain Keith Allred, hearing the first U.S. military commission trial since World War II, tossed out statements by Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, because he believes they were obtained under "highly coercive" conditions. That doesn't bode well for future tribunals in cases where U.S. interrogators used even harsher techniques - such as the waterboarding used on confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - to extract confessions from suspected al-Qaeda members...
...Legal experts inside and outside the Pentagon were scrambling Tuesday to figure out the impact of Captain Allred's Monday-night decision to bar statements Hamdan made after his capture in Afghanistan in late 2001. Hamdan had been bound hand and foot 24 hours a day, sometimes with a bag over his head, in what amounted to solitary confinement at Kabul's Bagram air base, Allred said in a 16-page ruling. "The interests of justice are not served by admitting these statements," Allred ruled, "because of the highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made...
...evidence. The commission's rules, unlike those used in civilian trials, allow the admission of pre-2005 testimony gleaned during "cruel" and "inhuman" interrogations, so long as the judge deems that evidence relevant and reliable. The rules also permit hearsay evidence. The judge said he would not bar statements Hamdan made after arriving at Guantánamo, where the trial's opening arguments took place Tuesday. But he insisted that prosecutors present the interrogators involved to explain the conditions under which Hamdan made those statements...
...Legal scholars will be paying close attention to see if Allred continues to crimp the government's case. "The decision may have a significant impact on Mr. Hamdan's case, but it doesn't change the fact that the system in place allows for the introduction of coerced evidence," says Deborah Colson, who has dealt with the Guantánamo proceedings as a lawyer with Human Rights First. "It doesn't change the fact that the system is fundamentally flawed...
...Jonathan Mahler's book, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power, from which this article is adapted, will be published in early August...