[Ppnews] Salim Hamdan's Sentence
Political Prisoner News
ppnews at freedomarchives.org
Fri Aug 8 11:24:22 EDT 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington08082008.html
August 8, 2008
Does It Signal the End of Gitmo?
Salim Hamdan's Sentence
By ANDY WORTHINGTON
In a decision that will shock those watching the
conclusion of the first full U.S. war crimes
trial since the Nuremberg Trials, the military
jury that convicted Salim Hamdan of providing
material support for terrorism on Wednesday has
sentenced him to serve five and a half years in
prison. Given that the judge in his case, Navy
Capt. Keith Allred, had earlier ruled that he
would be given credit for time served since
Hamdan was first charged under the Commission
system in July 2003, this means that he will be
eligible for release in five months time.
The verdict will do nothing to convince the many
critics of the Military Commission trial system
that it is valid -- as there remain too many
issues with the Commissions use of hearsay and
coerced evidence, of secret testimony, and of
attempts to justify elevating material support
for terrorism to the level of a war crime,
despite no precedent for doing so -- but it must
surely come as a relief to those who thought that
the jury might have been persuaded by prosecutor
John Murphy, who argued that Hamdans penalty
should be a sentence of at least 30 years,
something so significant that it forecloses any
possibility that he reestablishes his ties with terrorists.
Instead, the sentence is close to the length of
time proposed by Hamdans defense lawyer Charles
Swift, the former military lawyer who brought
down the Commissions first incarnation as
illegal in the Supreme Court in June 2006. Swift
argued that Hamdan should receive a sentence of
less than four years because his cooperation
with U.S. intelligence services more than
outweighed his culpability as a member of [Osama] bin Laden's motor pool.
This is, I believe, an extremely important point,
as it was apparent during Hamdans
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/08/06/a-critical-overview-of-salim-hamdans-guantanamo-trial-and-the-dubious-verdict/>two-week
trial that he had been exploited by those seeking
to prosecute him, who had built a case against
him through his own words. At issue was the Fifth
Amendment protection against self-incrimination,
which has been denied to all those deemed enemy
combatants in the War on Terror. While this
remains unacceptable -- and is intimately
connected with the dark heart of the
administrations deliberate policy of shredding
the Geneva Conventions to facilitate the illegal
interrogation of prisoners (whether coercively or
not) -- what made it particularly troubling in
Hamdans case was that, whereas other,
non-cooperative prisoners had been released from
Guantánamo without ever incriminating themselves,
Hamdan was being punished for his cooperation.
While legal challenges to the system will be more
muted as a result of this verdict, it is unlikely
that Hamdans defenders will be persuaded not to
pursue their many, valid complaints about a
system which, as Charles Swift explained today,
remains nothing more than a made-up tribunal to try anybody we dont like.
However, what this sentence also achieves, which
was previously unconceivable, is to cap the
disturbingly open-ended nature of the
administrations detention policies, in a way
that was only previously managed through a plea
bargain -- that of the Australian David Hicks,
who, in the first of the Commission trials
following their resuscitation in the fall of 2006
in the Military Commissions Act, received a
nine-month sentence to add to the five years and
three months he had already spent in U.S. custody.
Until now, the administration has maintained
that, if it wishes, it has the right to hold
enemy combatants without charge or trial until
the end of hostilities, which, it has also
admitted, might last for generations. A sentence
has now superseded that open-ended policy. If one
of Osama bin Ladens drivers gets a sentence of
seven years and one month in total (five and half
years plus the 19 months of his imprisonment
before he was charged) in a system specifically
established by the administration to try and
convict terror suspects, it is surely now
inconceivable that those who planned the whole
post-9/11 detention policy can maintain that they
can still continue to hold him as an enemy
combatant after his sentence has been served --
or, for that matter, that they can continue to
hold any of the 130 or so prisoners in Guantánamo
who have not been cleared, and who are not
scheduled to face a trial by Military Commission, beyond the end of the year.
With this sentence, it appears that the death
knell has just been sounded for the whole malign Guantánamo project.
Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the
author of
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published
by Pluto Press). Visit his website at:
<http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/>www.andyworthington.co.uk
He can be reached at:
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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