The Washington Post reports that the US military is ready to start its 9/11 show trials. Well, what else do you call a trial in which much of the evidence has been extracted by torture, the suspects have been kept imprisoned for years without being charged and it’s only through a Supreme Court ruling that the defendants even have a semblance of a proper trial, rather than a military tribunal?
It’s quite obvious that these trials are intended primarily for propaganda, another feature it has in common with the show trials of Stalin. This was so obvious even the hapless BBC reporter I heard on the subject this afternoon acknowledged it, though he missed the point by assuming it was meant for international consumption. Which of course it isn’t.
Instead its meant for internal use, a little booster for the coming elections to help the Republicans regain some of their mojo as the big daddy security party. The last eight years under Bush II have been a bit of a disaster in this regard, what with 9/11, the failure in Afghanistan and the Iraqi clusterfuck, so much so that even the biggest Bush cheerleaders have long ago hung up their pompoms (with some exceptions). They need closure, to make Bush look a little bit less like a miserable failure and to make his successors look slightly more appetising. Good thing they have all those dangerous terrorists on ice at Guantanamo….