A few weeks ago, conservatives went nuts over a ruling in the trial of alleged Tanzanian Embassy bomber and former Gitmo detainee Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, in which Judge Lewis Kaplan excluded the testimony of a witness whose identity had originally been gleaned through torture.
There was a whole lot of insincere hand-wringing over the possibility that the government's case would be fatally wounded by the exclusion of this testimony, when in fact that's exactly what conservatives were hoping for. Having supported the brutal interrogation policies that had set back the government's case, they were trying to figure out how to avoid taking responsibility for the inevitable consequences of the policies they supported: Torturing suspects makes it hard to try them, regardless of the venue. What conservatives wanted was some kind of circus that would prove civilian courts can't handle terror trials.
The trial wrapped Wednesday after only four weeks, with little drama or fanfare. With no cheap political points to score, the same people wailing about what a fiasco this was going to be have fallen silent. If the jury sides with the defense and decides that Ghailani unwittingly aided in the al-Qaeda-executed bombings of the American embassies in Dar-es-Salaam and Nairobi, conservatives will raise their voices again, but all that proves is the cynicism of their position. They're not looking for due process; they're looking for a process that can only end in conviction. They want show trials, not fair trials.
