Noah Feldman, Columnist

Obama Makes Guantanamo Tribunals More Difficult

Plan to close the military prison repudiates its justice system while trials are ongoing.

February 23, 2016 at 6:44 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Will the sun ever set for good over Gitmo?
Photographer: Brennan Linsley-Pool/Getty Images

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Buried in the middle of President Barack Obama’s speech Tuesday on closing the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a remarkable statement very close to a repudiation of the military commissions trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and nine other terrorists.

Obama first said that the “costly” commissions hadn’t resulted in a conviction related to the Sept. 11 attacks. He noted that the commissions had been reformed under his administration -- neatly implying that he hadn’t initiated them -- and said he was proposing more changes, which Congress would have to approve. And he went on to praise the civilian criminal courts, known as the Article III courts for the section of the Constitution that established them, for convictions in other terrorist attacks, including the Boston Marathon bombing.