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US Military Jury Finds Hamdan Guilty on One Terrorism Charge

Wednesday 06 August 2008

by:   |  Agence France-Presse

photo
Salim Hamdan. (Artwork: Janet Hamlin)

    US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - Military jurors found Osama bin Laden's former driver Salim Hamdan not guilty Wednesday on terrorist conspiracy charges but convicted him on the lesser charge of providing material support to terrorism.

    The split verdict marked a dramatic conclusion of the first trial before the special tribunals created by President George W. Bush to try suspects in the "war on terror."

    The jury must now set a sentence for Hamdan, who faces a possible maximum term of life in prison.

    His trial was seen as an important test of the controversial military commission system, which has been widely criticized by human rights groups as unfair.

    The White House welcomed the verdict shortly after it was announced.

    "We're pleased that Salim Hamdan received a fair trial," spokesman Tony Fratto said.

    Clad in a white turban and tan coat, Hamdan, stood with a solemn expression and then bowed his head as the verdict was read out by the head of the jury in a makeshift courtroom at the remote US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

    On the single count of support for terrorism, Hamdan was found guilty of five specifications under the charge, alleging he served as a driver for bin Laden and provided assistance to the al-Qaeda network.

    Prosecutors said from 1998 to 2001 Hamdan ferried weapons for al-Qaeda and was fully aware that bin Laden's organization engaged in terrorism.

    "This military commission finds you on charge number one (conspiracy) not guilty ... of charge two (material support for terrorism), guilty," announced the head of the jury, a Navy officer whose identity was withheld.

    But rejecting the conspiracy charge showed prosecutors were not able to prove to the jury Hamdan plotted and planned al-Qaeda attacks on civilians or other targets.

    Defense lawyers said they would appeal the verdict after questioning whether Hamdan's role as a driver qualifies as a war crime. They also allege dubious evidence was presented in the case from coercive interrogations.

    "Is material support a war crime? The defense believes it is not," one of Hamdan's lawyers, Michael Berrigan, told reporters after the verdict. "That issue will go forward on appeal."

    Berrigan said it was a "travesty" that Hamdan was convicted under a law adopted in 2006, which established the military commissions, long after he was detained.

    Other inmates at Guantanamo face similar conspiracy charges and rights advocates said those cases could falter as well for lack of evidence.

    "This verdict will complicate the administration's plans to prosecute dozens of detainees in Guantanamo Bay," Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union told AFP after watching the trial's conclusion.

    "I think you see even in a flawed system the administration's positions in the so-called war on terror are too extreme even for American military officers," he said of the jury's verdict.

    During two weeks of proceedings, prosecutor John Murphy described Hamdan as among an inner circle of bin Laden's henchmen.

    "He's an al-Qaeda warrior. He has wounded, and the people he has worked with have wounded the world," Murphy told the jury.

    But the defense argued that although he was bin Laden's driver, Hamdan was a minor figure without a role in terrorist plots. His lawyers invoked the Nuremberg trials, saying Adolf Hitler's driver was never prosecuted for war crimes.

    New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) slammed the proceedings as marred by irregularities favoring the prosecution, making it all but impossible for Hamdan to get a fair hearing.

    "The verdict was in long before the jury began to deliberate," said HRW's Carol Chodroff.

    Under the US Military Commissions Act of 2006, it takes a two-thirds majority - or four of the six officers on the jury panel - to convict. It was not clear how the jurors voted in the case.

    The military commissions have faced repeated legal challenges and Hamdan's appeal could affect future trials.

    In 2006, the Supreme Court invalidated the commissions, which were restored a few months later by the US Congress.

  

Comments

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I believe, having set a

 Thu, 08/07/2008 - 00:46 — Anonymous (not verified)
I believe, having set a precedent at Guantanamo, the pilots of air force one should be put on trial for conspiring with a civilian starting a war.

What about the current

 Thu, 08/07/2008 - 01:49 — EDGEOFNOWHERE (not verified)
What about the current American "material support" of the MEK terrorists in Iran? What about the American "material support " of Osama bin Laden and his merry band of terrorists in 1980's Afghanistan? What about American "material support" of the Contra terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980's? The hypocrisy in this fake "trial" is mind-boggling! Poor Franz Kafka must be getting very dizzy spinning in his grave.

I FEEL THE DRIVER WAS NOT

 Thu, 08/07/2008 - 11:24 — Anonymous (not verified)
I FEEL THE DRIVER WAS NOT GUILTY OF ANY OFFENSE WHICH WOULD GET HIM A LIFE SENTENCE. THE EVIDENCE WAS A LOT CIRCUMSTANTIAL AND I ALSO THINK THESE DEFENDANTS SHOULD BE TRIED IN A COURT WITH A JURY NOR A MILITARY COURT HE WAS NO IN THE MILITARY.AT MOST HE SHOULD SERVE NO MORE THAN 10 YEARS FOR CONTRIBUTING TO THE CONSPIRACY BUT WE DONT KNOW FOR SURE WHAT HE DID OR DID NOT DO SO LET JUSTICE PREVAIL

THIS MAN IS NO MORE GUILTY

 Thu, 08/07/2008 - 11:28 — chris ryan (not verified)
THIS MAN IS NO MORE GUILTY THAN THE ADMINISTRATION IS FOR INVADING IRAQ THE 2ND TIME AND COMPLETELY POISONING THEIR COUNRY WITH ATOMIC DEPLETED URANIUM. WHY DID BUSH PARDON HIMSELF FOR WAR CRIME IF HE WAS NOT WORRIED HE HAD DONE WRONG AND KNEW IT?????

"What happened was the

 Thu, 08/07/2008 - 12:55 — Fr Tothus (not verified)
"What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security ... To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, regretted. Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven't done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing) ... You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair. " German professor after World War II describing the rise of Nazism to a journalist..."The problem the United States faces is that almost all of its invasions violate international law, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, in a blatant manner. So how do the political elite and the news media reconcile this contradiction? Simple: They ignore it. It is virtually unthinkable for a mainstream U.S. reporter to even pursue this issue." John Nichols and Robert McChesney... "You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead." Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun... "Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people." Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)... "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." Abraham Lincoln... "We live in a nation hated abroad and frightened at home. A place in which we can reasonably refer to the American Republic in the past tense. A country that has moved into a post-constitutional era, no longer a nation of laws but an autotocracy run by law breakers, law evaders and law ignorers. A nation governed by a culture of impunity ... a culture in which corruption is no longer a form of deviance but the norm. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now." Sam Smith... "This country is in the grip of a President who was not elected, who has surrounded himself with thugs in suits who care nothing about human life abroad or here, who care nothing about freedom abroad or here, who care nothing about what happens to the earth... The so-called war on terrorism is not only a war on innocent people in other countries, but it is also a war on the people of the United States: a war on our liberties, a war on our standard of living. The wealth of the country is being stolen from the people and handed over to the superrich. The lives of our young are being stolen. And the thieves are in the White House." Howard Zinn... "Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it. Those are gifts from U.S. taxpayer to U.S. corporations..." Noam Chomsky... "The U.S. record of war crimes has been, from the nineteenth century to the present, a largely invisible one, with no government, no political leaders, no military officials, no lower-level operatives held accountable for criminal actions... Anyone challenging this mythology is quickly marginalized, branded a traitor or Communist or terrorist or simply a lunatic beyond the pale of reasonable discussion." Carl Boggs

The sheer hypocrisy of this

 Thu, 08/07/2008 - 15:57 — Anonymous (not verified)
The sheer hypocrisy of this absurd administration of injustice is completely boggling to the rational faculties; in the sense that we must suppose , since these trials are actual, that someone in the system and in the society believes that justice is being served!!! If this poor fellow receives a lengthy sentence for his participation in a mercenary army then what degree of punishment must there be for Bush/ Cheney and their cabal and all the mercenaries in Black Water? The one is punished for being an official taxi cab driver for one of America's defected agents, Bin Laden, the other's , Bush/ Cheney et al , have and are prosecuting an illegal and murderous war, with millions of deaths and injuries, as well as proving themselves traitors to the US constitution! Any ideas that the US stands for freedom and justice have been dashed to pieces at the bottom of the deep pit of depravity and moral bankruptsy that constitutes this criminal administration. There appears to be no end or bottom in sight for the continuation and expansion of these crimes against humanity and crimes against the earth as long as this monstrous injustice by the fascist masters of America is allowed to continue both by the American people and/or the international community.

Under this logic, George W.

 Wed, 08/13/2008 - 22:34 — brian (not verified)
Under this logic, George W. Bush's dog should be put on trial for receiving food from a known war criminal.