By Jim Miklaszewski, NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent
This week's
conviction of Salim Hamdan on relatively minor charges and the light sentence he got from the military jury first appeared to be a huge setback for the Bush administration's military tribunals. But administration and Pentagon officials are quietly celebrating the results as if it were some stay of execution for the military tribunal process.
Hamdan, who insists he was only Osama bin Laden's driver, was captured in the opening days of the war in Afghanistan with two shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles in his car. After wringing all the information they could get from Hamdan on al-Qaida and bin Laden through coercive interrogations, the military shipped him off to Guantanamo Bay. And for the first time in nearly seven years in U.S. captivity, things appeared to be turning his way.
In the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, the six-member military jury convicted Hamdan on five counts of providing "material support for terrorism" but rejected the prosecution's attempts to tie him directly to the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. Hamdan was found not guilty on two counts of conspiracy with al-Qaida to launch terrorist attacks. But it got even better.
During the sentencing hearing, the tribunal judge, Navy Captain Keith J. Allred, refused prosecutors' attempts to introduce the Sept. 11 attacks as a factor in sentencing. Capt. Allred also called Hamdan a "small player" and ruled that Hamdan would be sentenced on only one of the five counts on which he was convicted, because he said they were pretty much the same charge, which he characterized as "driving Mr. bin Laden around Afghanistan."
No free ticket for Hamdan
Although Hamdan faced a possible life sentence, the military jury gave him only five-and-a-half years. Since Capt. Allred had already given Hamdan credit for 61 months already served in captivity, he will serve only five months of the sentence. Does that mean that at the end of his sentence Hamdan will be given a new suit and a free ticket home? Not exactly.
The U.S. will still hold Hamdan as an "enemy combatant," and it will then be up to a Pentagon review board to determine if Hamdan is no longer a threat and can be freed.
According to one Pentagon official, "He (Hamdan) won't be going anywhere anytime soon."
What was the White House reaction to all this? "We're pleased that Salim Hamdan received a fair trial," according to a White House statement. But administration critics ask "What fair trial?" Despite the outcome in Hamdan's case, legal critics and human rights advocates still argue the Pentagon's military tribunal system is fatally flawed and stacks the deck against defendants by denying them many of their basic legal rights. In Hamdan's case, for example, defense attorneys weren't permitted to see the stacks of prosecution evidence against their client until the night before trial, because it was classified. In some cases, a defendant may never see all the government's evidence against him. Bush administration and Pentagon officials are unfazed. After all, they got a guilty verdict, and a seemingly exceedingly fair trial.
But that's not all. This week's results appear to throw the courtroom doors wide open for a series of military tribunals against al-Qaida terrorists, much bigger than Hamdan.That includes the self-confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammad and others charged with conspiracy and murder in connection with the terrorist attacks on the U.S. Those who lost loved ones on Sept. 11 have to be thinking, "It's about time."
In fact, military prosecutors are pushing for their trials to begin within a month. Defense attorneys say they've never gone to a capital murder trial on such short notice and accuse the administration of "rushing to judgment" to give President Bush a "9/11 conviction before he leaves office." It's difficult to imagine that the administration and Pentagon could have scripted the outcome of the Hamdan trial any better to their apparent advantage. According to one Pentagon official, "We certainly didn't plan it that way, but we'll take it."
