Josh Levin of the Los Angeles Times writes:

The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.

The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law -- and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.

The FBI investigations, involving as many as 300 agents and analysts in a "Guantanamo task force," have been underway for as long as two years. They were requested by the Defense Department shortly after legal rulings indicated that Mohammed -- the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and the other Al Qaeda suspects probably would win some form of trial in which evidence would have to be presented, according to senior federal law enforcement officials.

Think of it. Criminal suspects "winning" the right to have "some form of trial in which evidence would have to be presented"! No wonder it's not safe to let the kids play outside when evildoers are being coddled like this, huh?

With what we now think of as "normal" presidential administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George Bush the Elder, there are always moments when you catch the leader of the free world pandering shamelessly to some demographic or other, trading in his principles for some teensy bit of electoral edge, and you have to wonder, How can he live with himself? With Bush the Younger and his merry band, the operative question more often than not has been, What were they thinking? Did it not occur to them that this would inevitably come back and bite them on the ass? Even if they're completely cynical and morally bankrupt, don't they have any sense!? Maybe this is what happens when you've got a president who thinks that the day his approval ratings hit 90% is the one day he's had when other people's opinions mattered and that, as for the rest--well, as Fidel Castro likes to say, history will absolve him, and if it doesn't, well, as George Jr. likes to say, who cares, we'll all be dead. (I tend to think that anyone who spends that much time trying to come up with beloved presidents who were less beloved in their own time to compare himself to must case more about history's judgement than he lets on, but what the hell.) The fact remains, for going on seven years now, these people have governed as if their parents were out of town for the weekend.

It takes a special kind of bullying weakling to want--to need-- to use a national tragedy as an excuse to overreach the way the Bushies did, to make the kind of grab for naked, unchecked and unreviewable power. They have nothing to show for it but a botched war, some tainted court cases, and a number of broken lives, but it's become ever clearer with each passing day that they never had any real idea of what to do with it; they just wanted it, the same way that Bush, with no policies to promote and without an idea in his head, still likes to appear before carefully selected cheering throngs, just so he can hear their applause and feel his gonads glow. The irony is that, having sacrificed our freedoms and made this country and much of the rest of the world less safe while using the military to give itself a contact high, the Bushies will spend this last decadent phase of their era hiding behind men with fruit salad on their chests, daring anyone to say anything about them that they can spin as an attack on the generals, at least those who aren't talking trash about them on various op-ed pages. For anyone who's tempted to respond to this line of defense with anything but a rude snort, it's worth remembering that the derisive and worried phrase "the military-industrial complex" wasn't coined by some hippie blowing his nose on the flag; it was made famous by Dwight Eisenhower, a man who had served in the military and seen combat and who, not coincidentally, was cautious about the use of force while taking a dim view of those who sought to reduce American political discourse to a saluting contest. If I might be allowed a modest proposal, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we could get back into the habit of entrusting the presidency to people who actually know a thing or two about what war looks like. For one thing, it would disqualify just about everyone of a hawkish bent in the current Republican party.