The "All Along the Watchtower" quotes prompt this recommendation for another particularly pertinent song from "John Wesley Harding" (note eponymous criminal justice theme).

I won't paste the entire song here, but please visit http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/drifters-escape for the rest, which IMO is even more apropos.

"Oh, help me in my weakness,"
I heard the drifter say,
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away.
"My trip hasn't been a pleasant one
And my time it isn't long,
And I still do not know

What it was that I've done wrong."[...]

Bonus track [link@sig]: Secretary Gates signs order barring release of torture photos

Pursuant to new powers delegated to him by Congress, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has executed an order blocking the release of photos depicting the torture of detainees. In doing so, it becomes highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will further consider making the photos public, as a lower court had ordered.

___________________________

The Bonus track ought to reassure the anxious and fearful that the corporate lawyers running our monarchical security state will always be able to game the "justice system" to reach the desired outcome-- and it's all strictly legit!

Heaven forfend I talk up General Zod, but it's tragicomically hilarious to read the concerns about the prospective NYC trial expressed by incumbent and emeritus Elected Misrepresentatives like Gregg and Giuliani.

And the unavoidable trolls, of course.

I hate to overuse "puerile", but it goes right along with "pathetic", that modern heads of state can project a fictitious world-view straight out of action film blockbusters and comic-books.

Yet not only can they do it, they continue to do it, and they're given swooning deference and respect from the corporate media while doing it.

That's why it's called "infotainment", of course, but still...

First-- well not really first, since there are always antecedents in a circular, transactional phenomenon-- but remarkably, the Still-Mysterious 9/11 Events prompted the Unitary Executive to broadcast a scenario straight out of melodramas from pulp Westerns to James Bond flicks: a sociopathic genius of an Arch-Villain and his Gang inflicts criminal mass carnage and ruin upon the innocent (who must be Avenged!), then retreats to the fastness of an Undisclosed Secret Location to plan the next caper!

And now, the NYC trial venue question elicits opinions based on another well-worn cartoonish fantasy: the Phantom Zone! [link@sig]

This concept is actually a pretty good overarching metaphor for current practices of indefinite detention, Amerikan-style.

But these fear-and-ignorance spewing pols really seem to imagine The Worst of the Worst are being kept, and ought to be kept, like General Zod and his cohort, in an intra-dimensional equivalent of a Phantom Zone.

And putting them on trial makes the Zone-maintaining technology vulnerable to breakdown or sabotage! General Zod-- whoops, I meant KSM-- may escape! Just like in the movies!

It's hard to be sanguine about the prospects for justice being served when such simple-minded and hysterically deluded mountebanks are whipping up the Peanut Gallery-- and a maladministration that won't go past reassuring the Gallery that the Monster in the Closet will indeed be punished to the full extent of the Law!

(Disclosing to the frightened, anxious masses that there is no Santa Claus, only Nice Banksters, was a problematic first-term disclosure. But "There really is no 'Monster in the Closet'-- or under the bed" is more of a second-term disclosure, I presume.)