High-Profile Guantanamo Trials Are Coming

This may be lost amid campaign news, but here's the big news of the week-

The Pentagon has charged six detainees at Guantanamo Bay with murder and war crimes in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. Officials said Monday they'll seek the death penalty in what would be the first capital trials under the terrorism-era military tribunal system.

These trials will cloud the debate over torture and wiretapping and of all these civil liberties and humane rights... as is likely part of the point. After all, what's a little "water up the nose" when The Terrorists are out there, waiting to kill us?

As the President's plan on Iraq has been for some time to simply kick the can down the road for the next President, so too is he widening this other mess that the next Decider must clean up. The Philadelphia Daily News' Will Bunch sees the same thing-

"[I]t was a little interesting when, within days of McCain assuming a commanding lead in the race, and with the Democrats deciding between anti-Gitmo candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, that word was leaked of a secret site within Guantanamo for hard core al-Qaeda detainees, called Camp 7...

...[T]he timing of this strikes me as just a little bit too much of a coincidence here. The likely unraveling of Guantanamo is Bush's worst nightmare. A legitimate criminal trial under American laws of jurisprudence would expose the worst of the Bush-Cheney torture regime, including waterboarding techniques, and have a result that nobody in this debate wants: Making it impossible to gain real justice against the 9/11 planners, because of inadmissable evidence.

A quick trial under military rules, and a speedy execution, is the only long-shot hope for Bush and Cheney for making the worst of the torture nightmare that they've created go away...

...But as today's articles note, it is unlikely, with appeals and the like, that any conviction and death penalty could be carried out as quickly as January. That lays the problem on the lap of the next president -- regardless of whether it's McCain, Clinton or Obama -- who would have to either affirm the military tribunals, or else declare on the first day of their presidency that one of their first officials acts will be to overturn a death sentence for a 9/11 mastermind.

That's a classic Rovian political trap if I ever saw one. And it's more proof that undoing the nightmare eight years of Bush and Cheney is going to be a lot more work than simply placing a right hand on the Bible."

I hope that the next President is planning to seek two terms. Because that is likely how long it will take to start resolving all that Bush will leave behind, while at the same time attempting to craft their own agenda and direction. Not a pleasant task.