freedetainees.org

The verdict and sentence in the war crimes trial of Salim Hamdan at Guantanamo suggest a military judge and jury taking justice seriously, but the military commissions that President Bush designated for handling such cases remain intolerably flawed.

The president’s novelty courts insult American values and affront the nation’s honorable traditions of military justice. They permit secret testimony and evidence, testimony wrung out by torture and hearsay evidence. The jury pool is hand picked by a Pentagon official who also controls the budget for the detainee’s defense.

In setting up the commissions, Bush, with Congress’s shameful concurrence, snubbed the civil courts, which had repeatedly shown they could handle terrorism cases effectively, and brushed aside courts’-martial, a proven and legally valid option for military justice.

The commissions don’t exist as a necessary consequence of any unique challenges posed by terrorism. Rather, they are a key part of the Bush administration’s program to entrench an expansive interpretation of presidential authority, one which would outweigh Congress and the courts in the careful constitutional system of checks and balances.

The commissions are of a piece with the White House’s misuse of presidential signing statements to subvert laws passed by Congress, its suppression of civil liberties and its viral secrecy. All serve modern conservatism’s hidden agenda to switch the presidency from a leadership position to a ruling one.

In the Hamdan case, the first under Bush’s military commission regime, the plan went awry, if only for the moment.

Hamdan was one of the Guantanamo detainees called terrorism’s “worst of the worst” by the White House. Prosecutors portrayed him as a “career al-Qaida warrior.”

The jury acquitted Hamdan of the serious charges of conspiracy in terrorism – even the prosecution conceded he didn’t know about 9/11 until after the fact and then only because of a conversation he overheard – and convicted him of just one of five charges of supporting terrorism. His support? Working as one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers.

Hamdan, after all the administration’s hype, was convicted only of being just what he always said he was.

Even so, the overwrought prosecution sought a life sentence, but the panel sentenced Hamdan to five-and-a-half years in prison – with five years credit, the judge ruled, for time served. Clearly, Hamdan was never the terrorist or the ongoing threat the White House and Pentagon made him out to be.

Hamdan was held in extraordinarily harsh conditions five years on Bush’s say-so alone and was submitted, as the judge found, to “highly coercive” interrogations – just so the president could show that he could do so if he wanted to.

Presumably with less than six months remaining on his sentence Hamdan will be released soon. But wait! There’s a catch, as there always seems to be with this presidency, especially when Vice President Dick Cheney is skulking around, as he has been throughout the program to aggrandize presidential power.

The White House claims it can still imprison for life anyone the president designates as an enemy combatant, as Bush has Hamdan, even if the detainee is acquitted or has served his sentence.

The White House has not, at least has not yet, said it will deny itself that perversity in Hamdan’s case.