In fairness to The One, I don’t understand why America’s prosecutor-in-chief can’t express confidence in convicting a guy whom his own DOJ is trying. When Nixon called Manson guilty 40 years ago, he was meddling in a state trial without having seen the evidence. Not so here, but oh well. This is indeed a gift to the defense, although aside from giving the court an extra procedural headache to dispose of, it won’t matter ultimately. No judge is going to free the mastermind of 9/11 on a technicality and no president is going to let the mastermind of 9/11 walk free even if one did. It’s a show trial, root, stem, and branch. Jonah Goldberg:

Every day it appears more and more that the White House wants it both ways. They want to claim that this is a fair trial but also an act of venegeance. The terrorists will be treated as if they might be innocent — key to a fair trial — but at the end of the day they’ll get their comeuppance. If KSM & Co. get off on a technicality, don’t worry, they’ll still be locked up, but when they’re convicted the White House will claim it was always a fair process. They’ll get a fair trial from an impartial jury in New York, but it’s “fitting” and “poetic justice” that the jury will be drawn from the community that was viciously attacked on 9/11. Fair but vengeul, honest but foreordained, instructive to the world but really just about the law: the rhetoric from the White House and the Democrats isn’t persuasive to those who listen closely and certainly won’t be persuasive to foreigners Obama is determined to impress.

Just so. Goldberg followed this with another smart post about how bending over backwards to convict KSM will lead courts to set precedents that’ll actually undermine civil liberties, to which I’d simply add that it ain’t just courts who’ll be massaging their principles to arrive at the predetermined result. How else to explain noted death-penalty opponent Eric Holder saying today that he intends to seek death for KSM? That’s a political concession to vengeance and a reprisal for an act of war … to be carried out in a civilian courtroom.

Below the “prejudging” clip, you’ll find a guy known for blaming others for his every last political difficulty asserting, with all apparent seriousness, that the decision to try KSM in civilian court was made entirely by Holder based on a close consultation of the law. (More on that in the next post.) Really, champ? Knowing that the foreign-policy credibility of the Democratic Party for years to come rests on getting a conviction here, you rubberstamped a decision made by someone who thought it’d be super keen to pardon Marc Rich? What could go wrong? Click the image to watch.