Under the military commissions, “Evidence shall be admissible if the military judge determines that the evidence would have probative value to a reasonable person.”

How “probative value” and “reasonable” are defined is apparently left up to the military judge who makes the determination of what evidence is admissible.

Also, statements of detainees “shall not be excluded from trial by military commission on grounds of alleged coercion or compulsory self-incrimination” so long as the “coercion” doesn’t amount to “torture”.

But evidence obtained through “cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods” is allowed, so long as “the military judge of the military commission determines that there is sufficient basis to find that the evidence is what it is claimed to be”.

So if by such means a confession is extracted out of a detainee, all that needs to happen for that coerced confession to be admissible is for the judge to say there is a sufficient basis that the confession is a true confession.

Now Obama has announced that hearsay will no longer be admissible as evidence under the military commissions.

But that’s unlikely to be of any great comfort for anyone who has already lost years of his life wasting away in a U.S. military prison facility based solely on just such hearsay.

Other “evidence”, including confessions coerced under what Obama euphemistically calls “cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods”, which in some cases amounts to torture, are also to be thrown out under Obama’s revised military commissions.

So Obama is lowering the bar a little bit, saying that interrogation methods need not rise to the level of “torture” to be excluded as evidence, only to the level of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods”.

But the Obama administration may still define such interrogation methods any way they see fit, just as the Bush administration defined “torture” in a way that allowed detainees to be beaten, threatened with harm or death, placed in painful stress positions, or given a bit of the old “water torture”.

So another thing Obama isn’t changing about the military commissions is the Executive’s claim to be able to interpret or define the law.

In other words, Obama isn’t changing Bush’s claim to authoritarian powers anathema to the U.S. Constitution and the republican form of government it establishes, with three branches, each serving as a check and balance against the others.

To sum up, Obama won’t change the fact that under the military commissions, the U.S. has declared to the world that it has the right to invade and occupy a foreign sovereign nation, that it rejects the right of the native inhabitants of that nation to exercise “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense”, that it may deem any person of that nation as an “unlawful enemy combatant” without any evidence whatsoever that the individual was actually even engaged in hostilities, and that it may imprison such individuals for an undetermined length of time without granting them so much as the right to appeal their detention in the Federal court system.

And Obama’s proposed revisions to the military commissions pretty much exemplify his administration’s rather limited conception of what “change” means for the foreign policy of the United States.

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