Whether his proposed changes will substantially improve the military commissions and increase public confidence in the commissions' administration of justice will be the subject of debate in the coming months and years.
Hampering efforts altogether was Great Britain's refusal in any case to share with the commission the administration of Palestine during the transitional period.
They said intelligence warnings they received throughout 2001 suggested that Al Qaeda was poised to strike overseas, not on American soil, according to accounts of commission and administration officials.
According to the commission, the administration released information sporadically over the 10-month investigation, hampering the inquiry, and tried to exempt more than 100 documents through what the commission described as "spurious claims of privilege," only to back down after the commission authorized its staff to seek a court order for the documents.
Although their tone remains critical, the auditors' report on the 1997 budget, published last month, was a pale shadow of the denunciations they have delivered in some previous years.In addition to the budget, Mr Liikanen looks after the commission's administration and personnel, a patrimony amounting to some 14,000 civil servants and 60 office blocks.
These days she's the sole Democrat on the commission (the administration has yet to nominate a fourth commissioner, who, rules dictate, would also have to be Democratic), a dubious honor, perhaps, but nevertheless a position of great importance.
You fail to mention the fact that the White House secured the right to edit the presidential daily briefings before releasing them to two members of the commission the administration selected.
The court is scheduled to hear arguments in March in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who has challenged the military commissions the administration has created to try terror suspects.
WASHINGTON — After working for a year to redeem the international reputation of military commissions, Obama administration officials are alarmed by the first case to go to trial under revamped rules: the prosecution of a former child soldier whom an American interrogator implicitly threatened with gang rape.
