Well, That Was Sure Worth It
Five and a half years for Hamdan:
A former driver for Osama bin Laden was sentenced today to 5 ½ years in prison for his material support for terrorism, a relatively light sentence that means the first detainee at Guantanamo Bay to face a full military commission trial could be released from custody in just five months.The six military officers who found Salim Ahmed Hamdan guilty of terror charges yesterday came back with the sentence this afternoon, knowing that the judge in the case was going to give Hamdan credit for the five years and one month of his pre-trial incarceration at Guantanamo.
I suppose it is time once again to break out the giant “USA #1” foam finger to celebrate our glorious victory in the War on Terror, because that was certainly worth all the fuss. We went through several years of hell just to have a special tribunal convict someone for precisely what they confessed to, and then sentenced them to a half dozen years. Glad we did all that. Except, even now, it is all meaningless:
It is unclear what will happen to Hamdan after he finishes serving his remaining time, because military prosecutors and military commissions officials have argued they have the ability to hold enemy combatants indefinitely, until the end of hostilities in the so-called war on terror. While the Bush administration could order him held, officials could also transfer him to the custody of his home country, Yemen, or release him outright.
So why did we even have the damned tribunal in the first place? Seriously. If this makes a lick of sense to anyone, let me know. From where I am sitting, it just looks like more of the Bush administration DWTFTW.
Dreggas
Bread and circuses, Bread and Circuses.
Of course the cost of all this would make any REAL fiscal conservative’s head explode.
Keith
And with Hamdan being credited for time served, he’s got 5 months left on the “official” sentence.
Davis X. Machina
So why did we even have the damned tribunal in the first place?
Campaign commercials.
El Cid
If we let anyone even think this guy could ever be let out, you’d have a plague of terror chauffeurs worldwide.
maxbaer (not the original)
Maybe Bush or Cheney will need a chauffeur after January. Hamdan does have experience working for fanatical knuckleheads.
chopper
and this is the crowning achievement of the whole gitmo/tribunal system. after all that, we convicted a chauffeur who pled guilty to minor charges and gets a whopping 5 month sentence.
Fern
To Yemen? Hoo boy. Might as well call it rendition and be done with it.
DSB
DWTFTW is right.
I also heard that he could be eligible for parole as early as a year.
And 7 years and this is the ONLY conviction? It took a little over a year to try and convict the 1993 WTC bombers.
Bill W.
I hate when John does this to me (which is all the f’n time).
DWTFTW??
Neither the google nor urban dictionary were of any help this time.
Davis X. Machina
A process slowed considerably by, uh, following the law and the Constititution…
Wait a second…
Davis X. Machina
Doing Whatever The Fcuk They Want
Thelonious
Bill W.,
I’m with you on this one. My best guess is “Doing Whatever The Fuck They Want”, but it’s just a guess.
Zifnab
Now that we know he’s guilty, people will feel a lot less bad about tying him up in Gitmo and beating him with barbed wire and stun guns.
And when his jail term expires, the GOP can make the worlds loudest fuss about how WE HAVE TO STOP HIM FROM BREAKING FREE AND ATTACKING AMERICA WHY DO LIBERALS HATE AMERICA OSAMA 9/11 AMERICA. And whatnot.
It’s a beautiful little stick to beat DFHs about the head with at every opportunity. And it was the trail case that Bush wanted to use in order to further expand his Imperial Presidency. The more slack he could yank up with Hamdan, the more he could claim “precedent” when he started rounding up the next batch of scape goats.
PeterJ
Driving While Tan For The Win?
gorp
This says a lot: after torturing this guy for five years, and with all the resources of the most powerful country in human history, all that Bush Inc. could get him for was driving a jeep, resulting in time served. What an embarrassment! Innercity cops in the US get life terms on false charges out of a much less friendly court environment
Bill W.
Davis X. Machina Says:
Doing Whatever The Fcuk They Want
tanx u
Delia
Ya think they’re going to actually let him go in five months?
Warren Terra
Fixt.
Remind anyone of David Hicks?
Although, of course, Hicks got his case settled earlier, and he’s free now, because he’s Australian; after his “sentence”, Hamdan gets to stay at Gitmo or someplace until we finally defeat that abstract noun.
zoe from pittsburgh
The man has been convicted of being Obama’s DRIVER. As far as political theatre goes it astonishes me that after they’re forced to have public trials that this is the first person they’re convicting. Please tell me that they’re just starting with someone low on the totem pole and are working their way up. Or is the next trial going to be bin Laden’s cook? his boyhood best friend?
Dennis - SGMM
Then Bush’s driver is looking at twenty-to-life.
Dreggas
Ya think they’re going to actually let him go in five months?
Nope they won’t, after all Congress gave president dick head the ability to hold him indefinitely until the end of the “War on Terror” which, if it’s anything like the “War on Drugs”, means that he will be dead and buried having never been released 20 years from now.
The Populist
If we have trials to show the world that the rule of law will be upheld, why would they hold the guy past the “sentence?” I mean if we can’t uphold our own laws and rules of conduct then why do this at all? It’s fucking embarassing that we hold these guys, the courts say “okay, you aren’t a bad terrorist,” sentence them and then the Pentagon says BUT WE CAN STILL HOLD HIM INDEFINITELY.
It makes us look like a banana republic. This shit goes down in crapholes NOT the US of A (or at least that’s how it USED to be).
Sad days….
The Populist
Zoe, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other big terror guy are also on trial.
John Cole
All I know is we better really stick it to Osama’s gardener or people might think this is a joke.
Jake
OT, but check out the latest installment of stupid from Jake Tapper.
Ordinary employees at oil companies have given a few thousand more to Obama than McCain, which means Obama’s a hypocrite. Or some such nonsense.
Tsulagi
You know where that’s coming from. No doubt directly from The Dick himself, or his chief limp tire gauge holder, The Tarded Decider.
So sum up. You have a military tribunal composed of officers I’m thinking weren’t selected for their love of OBL and AQ. Pretty safe bet. Those officers find one of the worst of the worst not guilty on the conspiracy charge he was held on for five years.
What they do find him guilty of is violating a law, material support, that came on the books while he was sitting in Gitmo, but one prosecutors argued should be retroactively applied. Apparently, ignorance of future U.S. law is now no excuse.
To really top it off, whether he was found guilty, innocent, served his sentence, whatever the outcome, the Honor and Integrity administration maintains a Decider can decide to hold his ass forever. Or anyone’s ass.
Congratulations Party of Bush, you brave Purple Heart bandaided dickless ticking time bomb warriors. You’ve earned a tip of the hat and a knowing nod to the U.S. from every tinpot dictator. A tear in the eye of old Joe Stalin. The STASI remain in awe.
Jon H
Same thing. Al Qaeda folks are always breaking out of jail there. Their prisons must be modeled after the F-Troop stockade.
Jon H
“And with Hamdan being credited for time served, he’s got 5 months left on the “official” sentence.”
It wasn’t clear to me how the 5.5 years relates to the time served part. ie, would they otherwise have sentenced him to 10.5 years, and the media is only reporting the 5.5 that remain?
Steve S.
“We went through several years of hell”
“We” didn’t go through jackshit, unless you somehow equate passively receiving government propaganda with torture and incarceration in a gulag, with the prospect of indefinite detention still possible. Being propagandized is not a wonderful experience, but please try to keep a sense of perspective.
gocart mozart
He is responsible for the events of 9/11. If Bin Laden did not have a driver, he would have had to walk to the terror planning meeting. He would have arrived very late. They would have started the meeting without him. Osama would not have been there to approve the 9/11 plan. They would have moved on to other business and after a large 5 course dinner, they all would have forgotten about the whole sordid affair.
MLE
Simple explanation: such a short sentence makes appeals virtually impossible and/or moot. The history of decisions in the Hamdan line were not very favorable to this administration and system of tribunals, and this effectively removes from further consideration this set of cases and its fact pattern. Future challenges will need to be re-litigated from scratch, thereby virtually ensuring validity of the current status quo for a minimum 4-5 years.
jake
Wow. bAdmin. is just racking up the score in its The War Against Terra. We have the Feeb sweating bullets while they nervously sing “Ding Dong The Anthrax Mailer’s Dead.” We had the Australian really bad Taliban terror dude who was released because Australia didn’t like it. Now this. Maybe they’re trying to make ObL laugh himself to death.
4tW!
Delia
Let’s be honest. Our set of homegrown patriot sociopaths know jackshit about running show trials. They really need to study the master, Stalin, who pretty much had the whole Western press buying the prisoners’ wholesale confessions to dastardly deeds until Khrushchev spilled the beans after his death. And he didn’t start with crummy little chauffeurs, either. No, he started with the big boys. With the equivalents of the Colin Powells, the Paul O’Neills, the General Shinsekis. All those people who can do you wrong when they disagree with you. What a bunch of goofballs.
Ted
Yeah. Imagine that. The first pres. candidate in history to rake in these enormous amounts of small contributions from middle-class people. Is Tapper stupid? Of course all the executives of oil companies are going to give to McCain, in maxed-out checks. But when there are 175 times more non-executive, non-rich employees in the company possibly donating to Obama, they manage to cancel out the execs. I guess breaking down the contribution profiles was too much work for Tapper.
w vincentz
I didn’t read all of this thread. Sorry…I usually do,
long day..yada..
I’ll start by saying that good to see John is back in form.
Not that you haven’t been, John, just back to the passion.
OK…that said, here’s my take.
The entire bullshit was about the TERRORISTS!
They are STILL around. “We” (the Bushtards, or so they say) have PROOF!
Guess what?
The (whisper) “terrorists” (whisper), are the ones you need to FEAR. The ones that will come right here to the once great ol’ US of A and take them away.
Yup.
So… name the “terrorists” that took away your 4th Amendment rights, having your phone tapped (FISA), checks up on the books you’ve taken out of the fucking library? The ones that like torture.
Yup.
So many idiots bought that they they are still worried about those “terrorists” over there.
If others that read this and refuse to recognize the damage that has been done to all of us (the “people”), then either you are an idiot also, or perhaps sympathetic with the “terrorists”.
Those “terrorists” live right here.
And I think you might know who I’m talking about and where they live.
w vincentz
Geesh…I forgot to ask.
What the fuck does DWTFTW mean? I don’t understand all this new fangled internet lingo.
Thanks.
Speak “English”!
gocart mozart
w vincentz is not aware of all internet traditions.
KC
Oh well. I guess we’ll have to wait for the coming McCain administration to straighten all this out.
chopper
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
ergo, throw the nail-maker guy in gitmo for the rest of his life. that’ll show em.
Warren Terra
I’m guessing it’s ‘Does What The Fnck They Want’.
Google wasn’t a great help to me in this instance. I’m just glad this blog isn’t LGM or S,N! where Vincentz’s befuddlement and my uncertainty would mean that our comments would bely the subtitle of the blog.
p.a.
All I know is we better really stick it to Osama’s gardener or people might think this is a joke.
Can we give Post of the Day to the owner of the blog?
Will Bush et al get in the Guinness World Book for Longest Continuous Piece of Performance Art, Theater of the Absurd mode? Don’t say Tragedy; that requires a moral center to the characters.
Ninerdave
OT but none the less outrageous. Balloon Juice is no longer the top link on Google for skull fucking kittens.
Conservatively Liberal
Zoe, I know the Repugs don’t like Obama but this is taking it too far. ;)
jbarntt
Hi John,
So why did we even have the damned tribunal in the first place? Seriously. If this makes a lick of sense to anyone, let me know. From where I am sitting, it just looks like more of the Bush administration DWTFTW.
Maybe you should follow the Supreme Court a bit more for an answer to your question.
Honest to God, are you really this stupid ?
Chuck Butcher
George II needs a concrete exemplar to justify his trampling of the Constitution and Common Law. There have to be convictions under his kangeroo courts to justify his existance. What does he have left? WMDs? Democracy at gunpoint? Cheap Oil? Victory at anything? A pathetic faux cowboy.
Badtux
I see that John Cole has voted for “gardener” above. My vote, however, is bin Laden’s barber. If you remember the last video, Osama’s beard was nicely trimmed and his hair was nicely trimmed too. He didn’t look at all like a madman who lives in a cave, and thereby retained his credibility with his peeps. Clearly we must find, arrest, and imprison the man who allowed this to happen: Osama bin Laden’s barber.
—Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Onkel Fritze
So his ‘official’ sentence will end in 5 months. Just in time for the new president. If it’s Obama and they let him go, the Republicans can scream blue murder once again – after all, the Pentagon has said that they don’t have to let him go. Obama loves terrorists, point proven.
Dennis - SGMM
He’s smart enough to close a tag.
Tom
I actually don’t have much of a problem with this. And I don’t mind if we hold him in definitely now.
The problem I have is holding people indefinitely without proving they enemy combatants. This tribunal proves this guy is a member of Al Qaeda, so I don’t have a problem keeping him detained now.
Heshe
Makes perfect sense to me, but I’m now siting in that alternative universe on the other side of the rainbow. Oh no, I see Big Dick and Bushy across the room. Time for me to leave.
jcricket
No reason.
This has been “SASQ”, Part Infinity.
You’re implying that some kind of rational thought, causality and strategic thinking apply to the modern-day GOP and Bush administration. Fundamental mistake there.
Cris
Did we ever reach the end of hostilities in the War on Poverty?
Gregory
Brilliant…so when the SCOTUS releases him on Constitutional grounds the wingnuts can blame it on “activist judges” and not the Bush Administration’s fuck-uppery. Simply full of win.
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