By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch
".....The scenario envisaged by Obama, his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Holder is presumably that somehow a jury of unprejudiced citizens will be convened, and ultimately – hopefully sometime before the election of 2012, at least Khaled Sjhaikh Mohammed will step into the execution chamber, thus vindicating Obama’s oft-advertised commitment to track down the perps of 9/11 and kill them. So eager is Obama to underline this point that last Friday he declared in Japan that those offended by the trial will not find it “offensive at all when he’s convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him.”. This remark came right after his assertion that the trial would be “subject to the most exacting demands of justice.” Realising that the latter remark might be construed by some pettifogging civil libertarians as prejudicial to a fair trial , Obama then added that he was “not going to be in that courtroom. That’s the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury.”......
Of course there are those who gravely lament the impending spectacle, the fakery of judicial “impartiality”, the pompous sermons about the rule of law, the hysteria, the howls for vengeance. Bring them on, say I. Let's face it, we could do with some drama and American political life is at its most vivid amid show trials. Their glare discloses the larger political system in all its pretensions and its disfigurements. The show trial is as American as cherry pie , as the former Black Panther H. Rap Brown – currently serving life without the possibility of parole in the Supermax in Florence, Colorado – famously said about violence."
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