Apparently, military law was quietly changed to allow executions to be done offshore and by other means if the President so desires (rather than by lethal injection at Fort Leavenworth, which has been military law for a long time). The idea here is that in addition to functioning as an offshore torture center, Gitmo could also be used as an offshore execution site to avoid the constraining US legal system that might get in the way if the executions were done at Fort Leavenworth.
While i fully support the death penalty for any who were directly involved with the 9-11 attacks (provided they have a real trial using the United States criminal code and not a Bush kangaroo court), there is a bit of irony in the way the Bush administration is attempting to proactively sell this offshore execution idea to the international community, knowing this will cause a huge outcry:
Eugene Fidell, a Washington defense attorney and expert on military law, said Guantanamo Bay could be an execution site, but added that the U.S. would face an international outcry.
"It would be highly controversial because a lot of the world simply doesn't believe in the death penalty any more," Fidell said.
The Bush administration has instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to defend its decision to seek the death penalty for the six men by recalling the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War II.
The interesting thing here is that, not only has a senior prosecutor for those very Nuremberg trials Bush refers to gone on record in 2004 as saying that both Bush and Saddam should both be executed for war crimes, some of the very men alleged to be involved in 9-11 were, according to a recent CIA confession (after years of denial by the CIA and the Bush Dept. of Justice and the apparent destruction of videotaped evidence despite requests for such evidence), tortured a few years back against US criminal law and against the Geneva Convention, despite modern understanding which acknowledges that such methods are unreliable and using rapport-building techniques to elicit information works far better.
Even more interesting is that Bush is trying to invoke the heroic struggle of WWII to sell his latest attempt at legacy, while the reality is that not only did we put people to death after WWII for torture in general, we specifically executed Japanese officers for waterboarding prisoners in an attempt to extract information about an impending catastrophic attack (the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Even more ironic, we executed some of our own military officers at the turn of that century for ... you guessed it, waterboarding.
It would seem to me that if Bush successfully sells this idea, then along with any that are convicted by a real legal process of participating in 9-11, by all rights he would also need to execute those that have engaged in waterboarding the past six years right alongside them, whether it be in Fort Leavenworth or in a secret execution chamber somewhere at Gitmo.