Come on this is a Bush Jr. court. Is there any rules?

And if any become established what makes you think they would not change by the evening?

The people responsible for this mess are drum roll please the Bush administration. The ideologues here who want to "hang em" like they do "in their country," "quickly and quietly" seem to have forgotten that those hangings cannot be done "quickly and quietly," because the entire world is watching.

This kangaroo court needs to be shut down. Now. And the people who think filling the rule of law with vengeance do not understand the concept of the rule of law, nor do they believe in it.

If there are "Americans" who think it's a good idea to torture people and then send them to a court after years where there are two sets of rules contradicting each other, they should go live in one of the countries to which we outsource torture via rendition.

It's not that the judge doesn't know what the law says, it's that the statute appears to conflict with the procedural rules, but maybe not, and it's not quite clear to anyone. Blame Congress and the Pentagon. They're the morons that wrote crappy law.

You're usually hands down the best commenter on Salon, but you gotta raise your game a little bit here.

ehillesum you obviously don't know what your own government is doing or what it's capable of doing. All the lawyers at Guantanamo had it made perfectly clear to them from the start that there were to be no innocent verdicts. It's all a con. All of it. It might as well be a play courtroom with play lawyers and a play judge. Ask Morris Davis who used to prosecute the inmates at Guantanamo but who now spends his time blowing the whistle at every opportunity on the farce that these trials are. When Bush did a deal with John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, to get an Australian inmate (David Hicks) released because his detention in Guantanamo was becoming a political problem for Howard the scales, as they say, fell from Davis' eyes. He had been told these were incredibly dangerous people, 'the worst of the worst' and yet Bush could do a political favour for Howard and release one of them -just like that. Davis asked himself how it was that all of this could happen and he realized that he and all the other lawyers were being played for fools. What has gone on at Guantanamo is not only tragic for the inmates: it's tragic for what's left of American democracy. What has been done to the people in this concentration camp is just plain evil and until people like you stop trying to put the blame on anyone who tells the truth instead of on the pathological liars who invented the war on terror for their own geo-political reasons, no one will be held accountable for what's gone on there. Or is that what you want?

If they can't control their courtrooms, don't know or understand the law then they failures. Get rid of them all and replace them with people who understand what their jobs are.

I'm still not clear about most aspects of this.

Are the defendants interested in entering a guilty plea only on the condition that they be sentenced to death?

If they plead guilty and instead get sentenced to life without parole in obscurity (a fitting and just punishment, in my view), will they be able to withdraw their plea bargain- because they aren't bound to be executed?

It is a puzzler.

Bush gave al Qaeda everything they wanted, and what they fear more than anything is the return of the Democrats to the White House.

That should tell us something.

I think many curious and intellectually courageous people have, by now, come to believe that the events of 9/11/01 occurred with the collusion of elements of the federal government and the complicity of the national news media. If you doubt the foundation of this belief please see:

9/11 Press for Truth

9/11 Mysteries Demolitions

9/11 Blueprint for Truth

Loose Change Final Cut

For those of you who think you know what’s going on because of what you’ve seen on the tube or heard on the radio please realize that moneyed interests have been co-opting the main stream media for well over half a century. The videos listed above contain 1st person accounts and video.

With all the other illegal aliens.

I say give them what they want but execute them with the real criminals, Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell after giving them some quality time with waterboard and electric shocks and a"fair" trial in court. Find an Al Qaeda Attorney to represent their sorry treasonous asses.

Put the executions on pay per view and pay off the national debt. We would pay good money to see Cheney hang - all legal and everything, of course - like Saddam Hussein.

As for those in congress who voted for the war, I say send them to to Syria for rendition, uh, I mean safe keeping.

I say give them what they want but execute them with the real criminals, Bush , Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell after giving them some quality time with waterboard and electric chocks and a"fair " trial in court. Find an Al Qaeda Attorney to represent their sorry treasonous asses.

Put the executions on pay per view and pay off the national debt. We would pay good money to see Cheney hang - all legal and everything, of course - like Saddam Hussein.

no the blood thirsty nitwits on the right played right into their hands. Given how catastrophically wrong the right has been about everything under the sun, maybe the right should eat a little crow and take a big old swig of STFU.

Violence begets violence. Our stupidity in "prosecuting" this bogus "war against terror" and all it entails played into OBL's plan perfectly. We're well on our way to becoming the very things we claim to despise. In fact I'm not sure he could have predicted accurately all the boneheaded moves we'd make in response to 9/11. That takes a unique form of American cultural myopia, overhyped fear, and lack of perspective to accomplish. You'd think we'd get tired of getting outsmarted by the very people we trained to do this type of thing, but clearly they've learned the lessons of the teacher and improved on them. Question is where do we go from here.