Footnote to the preceding, The Mind of the Beast Div.

The Times article quotes John Yoo (Yes, that John Yoo, the one who thinks it's okay to crush the testicles of a child of a terror suspect) as proposing that, quoting now,

military commissions can balance a fair trial with protecting national security in a way that the civilian courts cannot. One of the purposes of the military commissions was to provide a forum where the government and Al Qaeda terrorists could reach plea bargains that would allow our intelligence agencies to win their cooperation.

The only rational way to interpret this is that the commissions are based on the assumption that everyone held now or in the future is guilty and that hearings are not about finding the truth but are just another way to compel "cooperation."

Yoo may be a certifiable psychopath (psy-cho-path, n., a person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse - more simply put, someone who can't tell the difference between right and wrong) but at least he's honest about it.