What May Be Achieved By Not Trying

Well, here's a pleasant surprise: after being held in various secret locations and subjected to various enhanced-assertiveness interrogation techniques including the hydro-respiratory, one of the Guantánomaly's residents has apparently made a full and spontaneous confession, not only to masterminding the 9/11 attacks but to the personal detrimentation of the American journalist Daniel Pearl and one or two other things as well. In total, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is supposed to have admitted responsibility for thirty-one attacks or plans for attack; and that's only in the bits of the transcript which the Pentagon didn't censor. "It is not clear why Mr Mohammed would have wished to confess to such a wide-ranging number of attacks," staff and agencies muse, with the hair-raising implication that Mohammed might be engaging in anomalous warfare. Mohammed is, after all, "highly educated" - not a very good PR move in the present climate - and "equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse", according to the September 11 commission. Doubtless it was the insidious effects of his elevated schooling which led Mohammed to compare his own terrorist activities with the relentless freedomising carried out by the Coalition of the Bunker-Busting, even though al-Qaida has probably killed fewer people. Nevertheless, now that Mohammed's confession has been obtained, after a mere four years of work, it should be clear to everyone that the advantages of a military tribunal, overseen by a trusty from the Bush administration, far outweigh any that a merely legal trial could possibly have. Quite aside from the expense involved, there would be long-drawn-out proceedings, an unwieldy reliance on possibly conflicting evidence, considerable potential for national embarrassment and, not least, the risk of providing terrorists with a recruiting platform which, with a bit of effort, might almost have rivalled the Iraq war for popularity and effectiveness.