This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 19th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown. In bringing

back military commissions to deal with detainees, President Obama may have dealt a death blow

through a troubling proposal that could have weakened constitutional protections

for U.S. citizens, national security courts.

Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst David Ritker's comments.

President Obama has stated his intent to continue to use the military commissions convened at Guantanamo.

The proposed revision of the military commission's policy, the press release states five changes.

Some of these are real changes and some of these, quite frankly, are window dressing.

First, statements obtained from detainees using cruel and humane and degrading

interrogation methods will no longer be admitted as evidence at trial.

This is actually, this is window dressing because judges wouldn't allow this stuff anyway.

And if you ask the military how detainees

are to be treated, they'll answer by the Geneva Conventions.

So we saw this on the first day of Salem Hamdan's trial.

He was a driver for Osama bin Laden, was picked up on the battlefield,

transporting surface to air missiles in Afghanistan at a time when the only thing in the air over Afghanistan was American aircraft.

Pretty clearly an enemy combatant.

And all of the statements obtained from him by anything other than lawful means were excluded.

So quite frankly, this, while it's nice to say

that we're doing it, and there is a text in the Military Commissions Act that has basically a grandfather for statements

that has not played out such that those statements have come in anyway

just because judges won't use them.

...