Word: legalizes
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...military tribunals of terror suspects at Guantánamo suffered a serious legal setback this week - 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...
...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...
...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...
...Providence-based Textron. Government officials suspect that Wilkis passed along information regarding that and other takeover attempts to Levine. Meanwhile, Drexel, Lazard and Shearson Lehman Bros. were all conducting internal investigations. Virtually every major securities firm in Manhattan circulated memos to employees reminding them of their ethical and legal responsibilities. One Wall Street mutual-fund manager confided that he is afraid even to telephone heads of companies whose stock his fund owns to discuss their firms' performance. As the press continued to dig for revelations, Director Sorkin said sourly, ''This has become a circus.'' True enough, but the show appeared...
...despite landing in the center of a historic legal drama, Hamdan remains largely unknown to the American public. His story is still shrouded in mystery. It remains unclear whether he was a dedicated lieutenant of bin Laden's - "a body man for bin Laden," as one of the government's lawyers once described him to me - or, as his defense lawyers will claim, little more than a lowly foot soldier. I've been following Hamdan's story since early 2004, when I started writing a book about his case, and I have spent hundreds of hours interviewing his lawyers...