If there's a trick here, Rico missed it

The Los Angeles Times has a story by Carol Williams about the Gitmo situation:

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 terror attacks today told the military judge hearing what could be the last war-crimes proceedings at Guantanamo that they wanted to confess to the capital charges they face. The defendants made their theatrical appeal as families of some of those killed in the terror attacks seven years ago watched the military court proceedings from behind a glass partition. The mother of one victim held up a photograph of her late son in his firefighter's uniform. "I wanted my son to be part of it. I wanted him to see it," Maureen Santora said of her 23-year-old son Christopher's symbolic presence in the courtroom. It did not appear that any of the men charged with plotting the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people noticed the photograph or understood that relatives of their alleged victims were attending the pre-trial proceedings for the first time. Santora said she wasn't trying to get the attention of the men she described as "hateful individuals in every way". "When they admitted their guilt, my reaction was, 'Yes!' My inclination was to jump up and say 'Yay!' But I managed to maintain my decorum," she said after the morning session.
The session was devoted to the defendants' request to dispense with pre-trial issues and go straight to entering guilty pleas. Mohammed and the others facing the death penalty for plotting the attacks on New York and Washington expressed their impatience with a process that has accorded them broad rights to defense attorneys and opportunities to contest the proceedings through legal motions.
After being allowed to meet together for a defense strategy session on 4 November, the five wrote a letter to the military judge newly assigned to their case, Army Colonel Stephen R. Henley, asking that all motions filed by their attorneys be dismissed and that the court refuse to accept any others without their consent. Four of the five had expressed during their June arraignment their desire to die a martyr's death at the hands of the US military, and the fifth apparently joined them during the collaborative session last month that resulted in the letter to Henley the same day.
Henley didn't review the letter until Sunday, though, as the rules governing the Bush administration's special military commissions court for terrorism suspects require that communications from "high value detainees" be read only in secure facilities. Henley said he didn't have access to the top-security venue until he arrived here over the weekend.
Mohammed, along with Walid bin Attash and Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, have been allowed to represent themselves in the case, which is unlikely to go to trial before President-elect Barack Obama takes office 20 January and weighs calls to close down Guantanamo's controversial war-crimes court and detention center.
The other two defendants, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa Ahmed Hawsawi, were represented by military lawyers that they have said they want to fire. Henley told them they must remain represented by the military lawyers until he holds a hearing to review the results of psychiatric evaluations of their competence to make informed decisions about their defense.
As has become his habit during rare exposure to international media attention, Mohammed, sporting a bushy, graying beard nearly to his waist, took verbal potshots at the judicial proceedings as he sought to speed up the process leading to his execution. "I don't know, are the military commissions using carrier pigeons or what?" he said to Henley in English, reprimanding the court for taking more than a month to read the defendants' letter asking to enter pleas and confessions.
Even if the judge allows them to plead guilty this week, the commissions' rules require that the facts of the case be presented to a military jury. The Pentagon had expected this week's proceedings to involve only law motions, and Henley indicated there were no plans afoot to assemble a jury.
Obama has said he intends to shut Guantanamo after he takes office. The president-elect hasn't made clear yet, though, whether he plans to try the terrorism suspects in federal courts in the United States, repatriate suspects for trials in their home countries, or create a new hybrid court system in the US that would accord the men some, but not all, of the rights of defendants guaranteed by the Constitution.

Rico says we should grant them their wish, and make them martyrs as soon as possible (hopefully before 20 January)...