Bin Laden driver convicted in war crimes trial

MSNBC | GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military jury on Wednesday found a former driver for Osama bin Laden guilty on some counts but cleared him of others in the first Guantanamo war crimes trial.

A panel of six American military officers delivered the decision in the case against Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni.

The jury deliberated for about eight hours over three days before convicting Hamdan of supporting terrorism. He was cleared of the conspiracy charge.

Hamdan held his head in his hands and wept at the defense table after a Navy captain presiding over the jury read the sentence in a hilltop courtroom on this U.S. Navy base.

He now faces up to a life sentence after the 10-day trial, which provided the first demonstration of a special tribunal system for prosecuting alleged terrorists.

The jury reconvened hours later for a sentencing hearing. It is unclear where he would serve his time.

It was the Bush administration’s third attempt to try Hamdan, who won a Supreme Court victory that scrapped the first version of the Guantanamo court system. The charges were twice dropped and refiled.

The charges he was cleared of on Wednesday — two of conspiring with al-Qaida to attack civilians, destroy property, commit murder in violation of the laws of war — were the only charges against him in the first prosecution attempt.

He was convicted of five counts of providing material support for terrorism, specifically that his personal services to al-Qaida included driving and acting as a bodyguard for a man he knew to be the leader of an international terrorist organization.

The 11-page verdict form was so complicated that the judge called for a yellow highlighter pen and marked the portions the jury president was to read. Jurors were allowed to strike some of the language in the charges, so some specifics of the verdict were not immediately clear.

Rules skewed, defense argues
Defense lawyers had feared a guilty verdict was inevitable.

The rules of the tribunal system at the U.S. Navy base appeared designed to achieve convictions, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, Salim Hamdan’s Pentagon-appointed attorney, said before the verdict.

“I don’t know if the panel can render fair what has already happened,” Mizer told reporters as the jury deliberated.

Hamdan’s attorneys said the judge allowed evidence that would not have been admitted by any civilian or military U.S. court, and that interrogations at the center of the government’s case were tainted by coercive tactics, including sleep deprivation and solitary confinement.

The tribunal system allows for an appeal before a federal judge, and Hamdan’s team is expected to go there next.

Appeal likely
Before the trial started, the team asked a federal judge to declare the process so legally flawed that it was unconstitutional. The judge, at a hearing in Washington, ruled to let the trial proceed, after which he would be open to reviewing whether it was proper.

The rules allow four levels of appeal, first to the Pentagon appointee overseeing the Guantanamo tribunals. She can overturn convictions and shorten the sentence but cannot add convictions or lengthen the sentence.

After that, Hamdan could appeal to a special military appeals court, then to the U.S. federal appeals court in Washington and finally to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Supporters of the tribunals said the Bush administration’s system provided extraordinary due process rights for defendants.

“This military judge is to be commended for providing a fair and internationally legally sufficient trial for the accused and the government — regardless of the ultimate verdict,” said Charles “Cully” Stimson, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs.

Hamdan was captured at a roadblock in southern Afghanistan in November 2001 and taken to Guantanamo in May 2002.

The military accused him of transporting missiles for al-Qaida and helping bin Laden escape U.S. retribution following the Sept. 11 attacks by driving him around Afghanistan. Defense attorneys said he was merely a low-level bin Laden employee.

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