The kangaroo courts begin to collapse
The sham "trials" of detainees at Guantanamo have always been legally and Constitutionally invalid, but they were continuing anyway. Now, the process of these show trials has met some blowback from within the Pentagon (in contrast to civilian trials, all of the defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges in these cases are uniformed officers in the US military). Defense attorneys for the accused would be remiss in their duties if they didn't criticize these kangaroo courts, but now that prosecutors and judges in these cases have begun to rebel, the system may be collapsing under the weight of its own illegitimacy:
The Supreme Court, then, is hardly the only thing standing between the president and kangaroo convictions at Guantanamo. The truth is that the best thing the commissions have going for them right now are the lawyers and judges in uniform who have, albeit reluctantly, refused to play along. If they'd been out on the battlefield, they'd have killed any detainee they met as an enemy. But they're not willing to see them killed in the wake of a sham trial. That's not because they value the lives of terrorists over the lives of Americans or because they value legal formalism over the exigencies of war. It's because they come out of a long military tradition of legal integrity and independence. And much as it must pain them, this precludes them from being yes men for the Bush administration at the expense of the rule of law.
Critics of the president's military commissions worried that the bodies would do their work in secret, in the legal shadows, answering only to the president as their commander in chief. But the soldiers and lawyers who insist on holding the proceedings to a higher standard have, at crucial moments, operated in the open. They've navigated by the light of the Constitution, sometimes at an enormous cost to their careers. Their performance is the best thing the Guantanamo commissions have to offer.
These officers are now admitting publicly that "evidence" derived through torture is automatically illegitimate and that trial procedures stacked overwhelmingly in the prosecution's favor are an abomination of justice. The Bush administration's use of torture to extract false confessions has finally been met with the pushback it deserves: uniformed officers who actually respect the legal principles underpinning our Republic have begun to publicly support the Constitution their civilian commanders in the White House have treated with nothing but contempt and scorn.