A U.S. military jury on Wednesday convicted Osama bin Laden's driver of providing material support for terror but found him not guilty of a more serious charge of conspiring with al Qaeda in a string of worldwide terror attacks.Salim Hamdan, 37, stood and listened with head bowed to an Arabic translation as he became the first man convicted at trial in the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.
So, this is what we have to show after seven years. A driver.
In convicting on five of eight counts of material support for terror, the jury appeared to reject Hamdan's argument that he was a mere driver, a $200-a-month civilian employee of a Saudi millionaire who happened to be Osama bin Laden.
Prosecutors called him a bodyguard, a key member of al Qaeda's security detail whose job was to floor the accelerator and escape should enemies attack bin Laden's motorcade.
But in finding Hamdan not guilty of two counts of conspiracy, the jury did not entirely accept the Pentagon's theory that the father of two with a fourth-grade education was a key cog responsible for al Qaeda mayhem culminating with the 9/11 terror attacks.
Prosecutors argued that — even if he did not know in advance — Hamdan affirmatively chose not to walk away from bin Laden after the terror attacks on two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000 and on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
Prosecutors cast Hamdan as an al Qaeda insider who arrived in Afghanistan in 1996 and developed intimate access and knowledge of the al Qaeda infrastructure -- from the media organization to the training camps to the compounds and farms that belonged to bin Laden.
Prosecutor John Murphy called him an "al Qaeda warrior.''
The jury cleared the driver of terror support charges that alleged Hamdan he committed a war crime by having two surface-to-air missiles in his car when U.S. allies captured him in southern Afghanistan in November 2001.
According to the military judge's instructions, the jury would have had to conclude that the SA-7s were meant to attack civilians, wounded or captured combatants or troops performing religious or medical functions.
Again, I'm not entirely sure the conviction of Hamdan was worth it, considering everything America gave up in order to convict him. We stared at the abyss, then built a subdivision in it and sold lots.
The Pentagon's deputy defense counsel, Mike Berrigan, called the conviction ''a travesty.'' He noted that when Hamdan was first charged, in 2004, before his lawyers challenged his case in the U.S. Supreme Court, there was no such war crime as ``providing material support for terror.''
Hamdan was tried under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, enacted by Congress after the Supreme Court shut down the Bush administration's first bid to try him.
During the trial, Pentagon prosecutors showed jurors a gory movie, The al Qaeda Plan, packed with bloodshed and carnage.
The Defense Department paid a consultant $20,000 to produce the film, modeled after one screened at the Nuremberg tribunals 60 years ago.
Defense lawyers derided the war court, called a military commission, as relying on federal agents' interrogations conducted from Afghanistan to Guantánamo without notifying Hamdan that he might be prosecuted and without benefit of a lawyer even in his second year here.
''In no other court in this country would the evidence be admissible,'' said retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift, who called the trial ``by no means transparent.''
Evidence like that is admissible in America now. Remember this. We threw away being a country of laws and became a country of political expedience. We did this on purpose. To convict a driver. We sold our souls so that this man would end up in a joke tribunal, with secret evidence most likely obtained through "robust interrigation methods", in a situation where even if he had been acquitted he would have still been held for the rest of his natural life.
As it is, the penalty phase of the trial is pointless. And the real tragedy is the man that is truly responsible? He's still out there.
The next President must end these tribunals and demand actual justice. That's what's at stake in November.
Any of us could be next right now.
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2 comments:
You know, in the Nuremberg Trials, all evidence was admissible under the judges' discretion. War trials just wouldn't work if hearsay were inadmissible, and witnesses could only testify to what they saw with their own eyes. E.g., who could testify to seeing Osama Bin Laden's assistants command terrorists? You can't politely ask terrorists to testify against one another. So you have to rely on piles of "he said / she said" evidence, corroborated by the testimony of intelligence agents.
If you go back before the early 20th century, hearsay (the main limitation on admissibility) didn't exist as a legal concept. This is probably because pre-20th century courts didn't have the luxury of having every witness present at a trial. And that's a luxury that war courts don't have either.
In a historical context, this talk of America selling its soul is rather melodramatic. Police officers once had the authority to summarily kill felons trying to escape. The legal penalty felons faced in most states was hanging. And terrorists? They would probably be tortured (using methods rather more severe than waterboarding) for information before execution. So whatever soul we're selling is one we devised in the New Deal era.
Anyway, I'm not losing any sleep over it.
Fair enough. You can't argue historical facts.
But what did America gain from having a war crimes tribunal as opposed to a trial? Did Hamdan's conviction bring us Bin Laden? Did it make America safer?
Did the system of justice before the New Deal make it right? We used to have laws involving slavery, women being unable to vote, and Jim Crow laws on the books at one point. Were they moral laws? We still have the death penalty. Is that moral?
Once you take the morality out of laws, once you declare a man "an unlawful enemy combatant" and he becomes a subhuman "terror suspect" at the whim of the President, what truly is stopping that President from declaring anyone else as such?
When you decide one human is beneath the rule of law, beneath humanity as a "terrorist" and another man is above it as "President", more divisions will eventually be made. It is human nature.
That is what we lost with this tribunal. If "you worked for a man who killed" is criteria for holding them indefinitely, then honestly, why not apply that to other suspected criminals in America right now?
Or can we not afford that luxury anymore?
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