Military tribunal convicts Salim Hamdan…for being bin Laden’s driver?

The Guantanamo Bay trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver, was billed as the most important in the annals of international military justice since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals over 60 years ago. Yet, with all of the media focus on the US presidential campaign (complete with this week’s surreal cameo by Paris Hilton), you can be forgiven for having no clue that Hamdan was even being tried. 

For the record, however, I think trying Hamdan for conspiring to carry out terrorist attacks, including 9/11, was rather like trying Al Cowlings, O.J. Simpson’s driver (Remember him?), for conspiring to murder Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

Not to mention that, given its purported importance, one would have thought Hamdan’s trial would have had even more media coverage than O.J.’s. But, reportedly, no cameras were allowed in this courtroom – as they were at Nuremberg.

Nevertheless, I was not at all surprised when a jury of military officers handed the Bush Administration a bone yesterday by finding Hamdan guilty of “supporting al-Qaeda by driving and guarding bin Laden.”  But nothing demonstrated the patently contrived nature of this trial quite like the fact that even this jury could not bring itself to find Hamdan guilty of the more serious charge of “conspiring with bin Laden in terrorist attacks.”

Yet I can appreciate why Bush, Cheney & Co. are hailing this mixed verdict as a triumph.  After all, it provides the foolproof, show-trial format the US Supreme ruled they needed as a legal cover to justify detaining all of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay indefinitely. 

Specifically, because the Pentagon has deemed them all “enemy combatants,” even if the jury had acquitted Hamdan of all charges, nobody believes that he would have been released. 

This terrorist guinea pig is a Yemeni father of two who was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and has been imprisoned at Gitmo since 2002….