Hamdan: Did the punishment fit the crime?

If the Bush administration intended its Guantánamo military commission to be “a kangaroo court,” said The Washington Post in an editorial, it has to be in shock. The commission, set up to try some of Guantánamo’s detainees, last week convicted Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, of aiding al Qaida, but acquitted him of conspiracy. In a “stunning” rebuke to government prosecutors, the military judge then sentenced Hamdan to 66 months in detention, with credit for the 61 months he’s already served. Prosecutors portrayed Hamdan, a Yemeni captured in Afghanistan in 2001, as a “hardened al Qaida operative deserving of life imprisonment.” Clearly, though, the judge and jury agreed with defense lawyers, who described Hamdan as a simple, barely literate man who took the job driving the famous sheikh to feed his family. The sentence was “measured, thoughtful, and fair—or as fair as a hopelessly flawed system could produce.”

How heartwarming, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review Online. For protecting bin Laden, transporting weapons, and aiding and abetting a terrorist network that “has killed thousands of Americans and continues plotting to kill more,” Hamdan theoretically will get to go home in five months. This sentence is “stunningly unjust.” An enemy combatant captured on the battlefield, Hamdan had no right to a trial—let alone to a bon voyage party during which the military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, wished Hamdan well when he returns to his family. Perhaps because of liberal carping, the military commission’s jurors and judge clearly bent “over backwards to be fair.”

Liberal carping or not, Hamdan may never go home, said Jonathan Stein in MotherJones.com. The Pentagon now says Hamdan will remain “locked up indefinitely” regardless of legal pleasantries at Guantánamo. Since he remains officially classified as an enemy combatant, he won’t have any rights even after his sentence is served. It’s no wonder “we have no credibility abroad.” We don’t have much at home, either, said Rosa Brooks in the Los Angeles Times. While Osama bin Laden remains holed up in Pakistan, “enjoying a good chuckle at our expense,” our government wastes its time trying his driver—and even then can’t get the results it sought. President Bush could have brought accused terrorists to trial in federal courts, which have successfully tried several al Qaida operatives. Instead, Bush insisted on setting up military courts with rules guaranteed to produce convictions. “So how are those commissions working out for you, Mr. President?”

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