Curiouser and Curiouser

Till yesterday’s eruption from Limbaugh, I hadn’t been paying attention to the whole KSM trial thing. Now that I do, it really puzzles non-lawyerly me.

Turns out KSM wanted to just confess to a military tribunal. Seems fair to me. No fuss, no muss. Then put the guy in some Supermax somewhere and throw away the key. (I think executing him is extra-stupid in this case, since it just makes a new martyr for the jihad, whereas… well, when was the last time *you* thought about Whathisface the Shoe Bomber?

But instead of letting this entirely sensible course of action play out, Obama/Holder insist on trying the guy in NYC and assure us that the outcome of the trial is foreordained: he will be convicted and will be executed.

Now here’s the thing: thanks to the criminal policies of the Bush/Cheney administration we know KSM was tortured. Yes, morons will quibble that waterboarding somebody 183 times is not really torture. But hey, they’re morons. The rest of normal humanity knows that it’s torture.

And information you torture out of people is information that is not admissible in court. Even Rush Limbaugh knows this. Which is why he’s got such a tormented relationship with this mess. On the one hand, he moronically defended torture, even going so far as to argue that waterboarding KSM 183 isn’t torture *because* it happened 183 times. The logic here is that “It can’t be that bad if KSM let it happen 183 times.” I eagerly await Limbaugh’s explanation that gang rape isn’t really rape since the victim “let’s it happen” more than once.

But I digress. The question is “What on earth is the Administration smoking?” Because it seems to me there can only be two outcomes: either we wind up decreeing information obtained by torture admissible in court (with all the fun implications that has for, like, you and me when Caesar decides to deploy this cool new tool in other crime situations) or we toss out KSM’s tortured confessions, find him guilty as a foreordained conclusion and pretend to have a trial.

The Administration has already made it clear they are not going to prosecute anybody who actually ordered the war crimes, so theory that this is all some roundabout way of trying to humiliate the previous administration by highlighting the inadmissibility of evidence obtained by torture seems… well, far-fetched. I’m not convinced they quite know *what* they are doing.

But I think Limbaugh is right to be concerned that at least one possible outcome of this scenario is that the Administration goes ahead and say, “You know, what’s so bad about using evidence gained by torture? We’ve already decided on the outcome of the trial, so why not?” The problem with that route is that once the precedent is established, it will lead to torturing other Undesirables–and possibly you and me should Caesar decide we are threats to his power.

But, of course, that has never happened in the whole history of the world, so pay it no mind.