by Damozel | I previously discussed commentary by legal and policy experts on the terror detainee procedures used in the Hamdan case. Shaun Mullen has background here. Hamdan has been sentenced to 5 1/2 years, which—as The Washington Post says—is a relatively light sentence. Prosecutors wanted him to get 30 years, if not a life sentence. (WaPo)
[The sentence] means the first detainee at Guantanamo Bay to face a full military commission trial could be released from custody in just five months.
The six military officers who found Salim Ahmed Hamdan guilty of terror charges yesterday came back with the sentence this afternoon, knowing that the judge in the case was going to give Hamdan credit for the five years and one month of his pre-trial incarceration at Guantanamo. (WaPo)
Surely that’s rather telling.
I am not prepared to accuse the panel itself of reaching
an improper verdict given the process itself. Certainly the verdict
didn't please the government and the sentence isn't going to make them
happy either.
At the sentencing hearing, Hamdan had pleaded for a light sentence and apologized to U.S. victims of terrorist attacks. “It was a sorry or sad thing to see innocent people killed,” Hamdan was quoted as saying.
“I personally present my apologies to them if anything what I did have caused them pain.”
He admitted that he kept working for the al-Qaeda leader even after he learned that bin Laden had planned terrorist attacks….
But he said that his only motive was supporting his family. The Yemeni father of two, who has a fourth-grade education, said he needed a job and that bin Laden paid well and treated him with respect.
Over time, his views of bin Laden changed, Hamdan told the jurors. Standing amid his lawyers, his head bowed, he acknowledged that he knew bin Laden was behind the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in a harbor in Yemen.
“It was a big shock for me when someone who had treated you, or we had treated each other with respect and regard and cordially, and then you realize what they were up to,” Hamdan said through an Arabic translator. (WaPo)
The prosecutor wanted a severe sentence:
He called on the jury to “send a message to others that if anyone thinks of providing material support to the sword of terrorism . . . there will be painful consequences.”
Defense lawyers portrayed Hamdan as a minor chauffeur who regrets his time in bin Laden’s service and was only trying to provide for his family(WaPo).
As for the faultiness of the Bush administration's specialized processes against terror detainees, the issue of the underlying fairness---including the means initially used to classify them as "enemy combatants" or to extract necessary information from them---isn't going to go away. And unfortunately, those questions are likely to taint all the verdicts and all the sentences, however just the military panels try to be in applying the faulty procedures. That's what happens when the process you use isn't the process that's due (under US or international law) under the circumstances.
Memeorandum has blogger responses here.
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This statement: "That's what happens when the process you use isn't the process that's due (under US or international law) under the circumstances.", like the statement that Iraq is an illegal war, is simply untrue. Both were clearly approved and declared legal under U.S. law. The U.S. is not now and never has been bound to pass its legal processes before some international panel for approval. And may that day never come.
But it is a shame that this poor little guy, who bears a slight resemblance to Richard Pryor and who thought he was only driving a religious basketball player around, bless his heart, should be hounded like this, don't you think?
Posted by: Fred Beloit | August 08, 2008 at 08:50 AM
Irrespective of the wide range of issues here about unlawful detentions and interrogations, the verdicts and sentencing in this case strike me as basically reasonable. I'm not saying I'm comfortable with the overall process, but not everything about it looks corrupt to me.
Posted by: Adam | August 08, 2008 at 03:59 PM