The audio for the Terry Gross interview with Spencer Ackerman regarding the military commissions hearings for Omar Khadr and the banning of four reporters from Guantanamo Bay is now up.
A key excerpt:
"Khadr's attorney's are trying to get all of his statements made to interrogators over his eight years in detention stricken from the government's case," he says. "And if that happens, while the military commissions don't exactly rely on the same kinds of precedential respect that civilian courts do, it would open the door for every other detainee who's going to be tried under the commissions to file a motion to suppress similar evidence that the government is using collected from interrogations of these detainees."
Sort of goes to the heart of the weirdness of the military commissions. A military commissions judge is essentially being asked not just to determine the outcome of the evidence in the case but potentially the fate of the entire alternative legal system that they've become a part of.
-- A. Serwer
