On the 7th anniversary of that notorious August 6th Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States," (which Dubya ignored cuz he was busy clearin' brush...) the Bush administration's Constitution skirting military tribunals claim their first victim. So what victory have the Bushies won for the Global War on Terror? They've convicted Bin Laden's driver ... of being Bin Laden's driver:
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's former driver was convicted of supporting terrorism in the first U.S. military war-crimes trial of a terror suspect captured after the Sept. 11 attacks. Salim Hamdan was found guilty of providing material support to al-Qaeda by serving as bin Laden's driver and body guard, Army Colonel Gary Keck, a Defense Department spokesman, said in Washington after the verdict was announced at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The jury of six military officers cleared Hamdan of conspiring with bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda operatives to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, Keck said.
And despite the failure to convict him of anything more serious than driving, the U.S. can now incarcerate Hamdan (whose name was made famous in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld cast that established a basic right to a trial for detainees ... fancy that ...) for the rest of his life.
A conviction means ``now we will have an appeal'' to test the validity of the crime of providing material support to terrorists, which is ``a new made-up offense that didn't exist when he committed it,'' said John Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate general and dean of the Franklin Pierce Law School in Concord, New Hampshire. A decision on that issue ``will be important because lots of people will be charged with it,'' Hutson said. The jury cleared Hamdan of specific accusations that he transported SA-7 surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan to be used by al-Qaeda to attack U.S. forces, according to verdict details described in a telephone interview by Air Force Major Gail Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Life Term The charges carry a possible term of life imprisonment. The charge of providing material support to terrorism accused Hamdan of serving as bin Laden's driver in Afghanistan, ``knowing that by providing said service or transportation he was directly facilitating communication and planning used for acts of terrorism.''
Ah, American jurisprudence! Fort it's next trick, maybe the Bush administration could put the late Bruce Ivins on trial posthumously for material support to the FBI in closing the anthrax case which they haven't got the goods to prove...
| Labels: al-Qaida, anthrax attacks, Bruce Ivins, domestic terrorism, military tribunals, Osama bin Laden, Salim Hamdan |
