"Obama aides notified key members of Congress late Thursday of his decision and asked them to help revise the military commissions system.

"The president had sought and received a 120-day suspension of the commissions shortly after he took office in January. He then began an internal debate over what to do with the detainees, as aides started working on the details of how to close the detention facility by the end of the year.

"Since the detainees were taken prisoner years ago, questions have surfaced about the kind of evidence U.S. authorities collected on them and whether any of it came from harsh interrogations.

"The Bush administration was forced to seek congressional action after the Supreme Court declared the initial military-trial courts — set up by presidential order — to be unconstitutional.

"Reaction to Obama's decision, however, was mixed.

"Some military and legal experts say that the federal courts are capable of handling detainee trials while others, including members of Congress, see the military commissions as the appropriate venue."

Jonathan Turley comments: "What is astonishing is how muted the response from democrats and liberals has been despite the fact that Obama has now adopted the very same policies that made George Bush an international pariah. It is clear that Obama has determined that these men stood a chance of being released if they were given full legal protections and procedures. Thus, he has discovered the value of extrajudicial punishment with indefinite detentions and tribunals. The tribunal system is run on rules written by the Bush Administration to ensure convictions. It has even fewer protections than allowed in the military system and has been widely ridiculed, even by some conservatives, as Kangaroo trial system. While Obama will reportedly alter the rules, the principled position would be reject the notion of special justice for certain defendants and to rely on our legal system to mete out blind justice."

Glenn Greenwald writes at Salon: 

"Let's concede that if the U.S. is going to continue to try accused terrorists in newly-created military commissions -- rather than under our normal, long-standing system of justice -- then it is better to have more safeguards than fewer.  That's just true by definition.  Let's further concede that many of the past criticisms voiced about Bush's military commissions, including some of Obama's criticisms, focused on the specific rules of those commissions, some of which (though far from all) are addressed by Obama's modifications, including the most important change that coerced statements are no longer admissible.  Nonetheless, the overwhelming bulk of the objections to what the Bush administration did was to the very idea of military commission themselves.  The controversy -- one of the most intense of the Bush era -- was grounded in the argument that there was absolutely no reason, other than to pervert justice and enable easy and due-process-free convictions, to create a separate tribunal rather than use our extant judicial processes.

"There is simply no way to reconcile Barack Obama's embrace of military commissions with the core criticisms made about Bush's system.  Just consider what was said in the past about Bush's military commissions by key Obama officials, Bush critics generally and, on occasion, even by Obama himself, and decide for yourself if this is anything other than a replica of one of the worst and most extremist abuses of the Bush era:

"One of the most definitive claims in this regard was from Obama himself, who -- at the height of the presidential campaign last August, after Salim Hamdan was convicted of minor charges by a Guantanamo military commission -- issued a statement that included this:

That the Hamdan trial – the first military commission trial with a guilty verdict since 9/11 – took several years of legal challenges to secure a conviction for material support for terrorism underscores the dangerous flaws in the Administration’s legal framework. It’s time to better protect the American people and our values by bringing swift and sure justice to terrorists through our courts and our Uniform Code of Military Justice.

"UPDATE II:  The most disturbing and longest-lasting consequence of Obama's embrace of so many Bush/Cheney "Terrorism" policies may very well be this. 

"UPDATE III:  Obama's just-issued statement announcing his support for military commissions is here.  I said most of what I think is worth saying about this, but I'll just add the following:

"(1) Can anyone reconcile Obama's statement today with his August, 2008 statement that we should prosecute accused terrorists "through our courts and our Uniform Code of Military Justice," or with the above-excerpted criticisms of Bush's military commissions?; (2) Obama doesn't even bother to argue any reasons why we cannot try accused terrorists in our already-extant court system; (3) for those who want to claim that Bush's torture prevents obtaining convictions in a real court, Obama is purporting to bar the use of evidence obtained via torture, so how would his military commissions address that problem any better than real courts would?; (4) during the Bush era, civilian courts had a far better record of convicting accused terrorists than military commissions did, including convictions of Jose Padilla, Ali al-Marri, Richard Reid, John Walker Lindh, and Zacharais Moussoui, at least three of whom (Padilla, al-Marri and Lindh) were severely mistreated; if we could convict them in real courts, why can't we convict the other accused terrorists who are actually guilty? (5) if the state is willing to accord due process only when it is guaranteed that it can win, but then creates a new system of diminished due process whenever it believes it cannot win, the guarantee of due process, for rather obvious reasons, becomes completely illusory ('we'll give due process as long as we're sure we can win, and if we can't, we'll give you something less')."