Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Fucks with the Gitmo "Court":
American harvester ant orgies are awful events. Sure, sure, in theory, the flying dance of virgin queens and male ants ought to be a thing of beauty: an airborne swirl of multitudinous variations on thorax-heating sex in the summer's end of the eastern U.S. But the sheer numbers of ants, combined with the voracious birds and larger insects that, as Edmund O. Wilson puts it, "scythe through" and gobble down ants mid-hump, combined with the potential to become windshield smears on passing cars, combined with the chance of ending up drowning in sticky clumps in the lakes, combined with the fact that, even after the crazy nailing is over, the queens, belly full o' sperm, have gotta negotiate a landscape filled with horrific dangers like centipedes, spiders, and frogs before they can begin to nest. It is, for all intents and purposes, quite literally, a life-threatening clusterfuck.

So it was that five detainees charged in planning the 9/11 attacks appeared in front of a military judge at Guantanamo Bay to inform the court that they wanted to confess. And then it gets funny. Not "ha-ha" funny, but more "oh, fuck, is this how low we've sunken?" funny. See, Khalid Sheik "Never Say Back Wax" Mohammed and his co-defendants, realizing just how fucked they are no matter what, decided to fuck with the military "justice" system set up to try them.

The five, who were tortured for a few years in some hole somewhere by the CIA before getting to Gitmo in 2006, announced their intention in a letter. Here's the first fun part: "Their letter was so unexpected that the judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, was unsure how to proceed. He noted that the law specifies that only defendants unanimously convicted by a jury can be sentenced to death in the tribunals. No jury has been seated." You got that? So idiotic has the U.S. government been in setting up these half-assed show trials called "tribunals" that the people running them don't know the goddamned rules. It's more like a game of kick ball played by a group of children, high on Pepsi and chocolate, boggled by ADD, making up shit as they go along. What happens if the ball goes under a car? Fuck it, just figure it out when it happens. And then fight about it.

The next fun part is that family members of 9/11 victims were in the "courtroom," getting to watch as the wheels of justice wobbled on their bent axles: "One of the relatives, Hamilton Peterson, said he was offended by the detainees, who he said were sneering and laughing in the courtroom. 'They seemed to view these proceedings as a joke,' Mr. Peterson said." And that'd be sad and rage-inducing if the proceedings were not actually a joke, or a "circus," as some observers put it. When you've placed people in a position where they have nothing to lose, they tend to act as if they have nothing to lose. Let us remember that not only was Mohammed waterboarded by the CIA's own admission, but the agency also took his young children into custody and told him they had the kids.

See, the Furious Five want to die because martyrdom is preferable to rotting in jaildom. But the Bush administration has so fucked the goat on the whole process that, like everything else, at this point the approach seems to be, "Ah, hell, let Obama deal with it."

As ever with anything about Gitmo, this ain't about sympathy for anyone who is actually guilty of planning and carrying out the 9/11 attacks. It's really about being patriotic. The Rude Pundit doesn't think the American justice system is so fucking weak and pussified that it can't handle charging people with crimes, holding them without bail, and then trying them. That's the patriotic stand. The Bush administration's pronouncements about the weakness of our own fucking courts should have been considered in the realm of "treasonous."

But, no, no, most of those in power just went along with it, including even some Supreme Court justices, saying, "Yeah, sure, you're right, GW, we really do suck balls. Please protect us by undermining our centuries-old legal system." And, thus, we have the end result: the Cuban clusterfuck.