Sometimes I hate it

when my expectations are met. This comes under the heading "Pretty much what I figured, but I didn't really want to know."

There have been rumblings for a while about the fairness of the trials under the military tribunals at Guantanamo, and this just puts the nail in the coffin. The administration now wants to kill some people just to prove that it was right all along.

Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon's announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes--and seeking the death penalty for all of them.

Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials have been rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.

In case there's any doubt that there is any motivation aside from face-saving:

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"

A question for the rightwing blowhards who've been criticizing Michelle Obama's remarks about finally being really proud of this country: Is this what you've been so proud of all along?

(Thanks to C&L.)