Why is it, do you think, that some tyrants love show trials? Why not, as death squads did in Argentina and Chile kidnap, torture and murder at midnight? Why detain & torture people, coerce confessions, rig kangaroo courts (my apologies again to the kangaroos who, after all are innocent unlike our Decider-in-Chief) and bar lawyers from representing them effectively?

As you may well know by now, Mr. Bush as decided to follow up on the show trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein (who may well have been guilty of something, but we’ll never know) by trying” six people in Guantanamo before military commissions and executing them. Their crime? A la little Rudy one-note, claimed involvement in the September 11 attacks.

In order to make acceptable the “evidence” extracted by Mr. Bush by torture (Did he watch the torture tapes?) a public relations campaign has launched to show that water boarding is just fine. Mr. Injustice Antonin Scalia loves torture , he tells us, rewriting the Federal Rules of Evidence with scenes Fox’s 24. (Do you think Mr. Justice S plans to recuse himself from deciding these issues? Me neither.)

The White House whitewash of water boarding, here and here is buttressed by a bizarre argument: after we tortured them, we interrogated them nicely, indeed treated them to Starbucks Coffee and they still confessed.

Further, of course, allowing Guantanamo detainees vigorous legal defense is forbidden and delays attendant to death penalty trials in the United States are planned to be avoided by killing them in Cuba . (see also AP story: here )

The desire for revenge is human. Many of us feel it. I know I do. In defense of its planned show trials the Defense Department has trotted out some family members who lost loved ones. They want hangings. Check out also this Daily News call for nooses . But why not just a simple lynching?

Editorial doubts about fairness here and here are worth reading as is this interesting, but written in legal lingo, note on
Guantanamo detention in legal context by Justin Florence in the Harvard Law & Policy Review.

Of course, the worst thing about this systematic miscarriage of justice is that – against all odds – the people Mr. Bush wants to judicially murder may have done something wrong, but we’ll never know.