A military tribunal has tried Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, and found him guilty of receiving weapons training and delivering arms in the cause of terrorist attacks on the United States. He has been sentenced to imprisionment for five and a half years. Hamdan has been in U.S. custody since the end of 2002 — and the tribunal gave him credit for the five years he has been held in Guantanamo Bay as time served during the sentencing.
That means that Hamdan will be released from prison in a few months. Maybe he’ll go home to Yemen. Maybe he’ll try and stay here. Really. This is Hamdan’s reaction to the sentence: “I would like to apologize one more time to all the members and I would like to thank you for what you have done for me.” What more could you ask from a defendant?
Unlike a number of liberal pundits and news sources, I do not assume that the military tribunal was unfairly biased against Hamdan. I am willing to give the military judges who heard and decided his case the benefit of the doubt that they did their job in good faith and took the time to evaluate evidence offered by his lawyers and to consider their arguments. And the application of time served is also an indicator that the military tribunal is trying to execute its function in good faith. Most importantly, the judges on the military tribunal are Americans, and they are lawyers. They understand their role in the administration of justice as well as the protection of national security.
Indeed, the very light punishment is as strong an indication that I need to be satisfied that these military tribunals are indeed exercising independent judgment and doing all that they can to aim at a just and fair result. That’s what we would want any kind of court to do.
In the meantime, the White House and the U.S. Attorney’s office and the DOJ and the Pentagon have all got to be spitting mad at the sentence. They’re basically letting the guy walk.
Unlike a number of conservatives, I do not recoil in horror at the leiniency of the punishment, nor do I rejoice in seeing the military tribunal actually convict and sentence someone. No one should ever rejoice in the criminal conviction of someone else. Satisfaction with the rendering of justice should be as far as that goes, because the thing to rejoice about would have been that no crime had been committed at all. As to this particular conviction, I’m queasy with the concept of a military tribunal at all, even under these circumstances. Maybe it really is the best way to have gone, but I really think that whether the power to use them is valid or not, the resort to such a judicial process was the result of a failure of imagination on the part of the courts and Congress.
As to his relatively imminent release, Hamdan was a small creature in the Al-Qaeda network, a man who enjoyed close proximity to the leader but was far, far from a big wheel in the decision-making scheme of things. According to the defense, he worked for a wage, not for an ideology. He was caught transporting missiles, which he claimed were not his, and yes, that’s a lame defense. All the good intelligence that could be had from his has been had. Hamdan is no more dangerous to us than any other Yemeni. His post-trial statement shows contrition for his involvement and respect for the tribunal that heard his case. This man is unlikley to be a threat to us upon his release.
It’s quite unlikely that his conviction will make us any safer or smarter than we were before.
