Tim Sumner

Boumediene v. Bush, Hamdan, unlawful combatants, War on Terror

America owes no quarter to unlawful combatants

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I am a former soldier, not a lawyer. I view the recent majority rulings of our Supreme Court concerning unlawful combatants such as in Hamdi, Rasul, Hamdan, and Boumediene as adding, not detracting, to the bloody chaos of war. In addition, the entire debate about using intelligence as evidence against the unlawful combatants, even that which was derived by coercive techniques, is flawed. Perhaps we should not pull the wings off flies like Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during this War on Terror but misery should be an unlawful combatants only lot in life.

Beyond extending our Constitution protections to non-citizens outside our borders and territories, we have ceded legal protections to unlawful combatants that wholly operate outside modern civilization’s Laws of Wars. Lawyers, including many who have worn military uniforms for decades, seem to have lost all sight of why those laws evolved and deliberately left unlawful combatants unprotected.

al Qaeda, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Military Commissions, Osama bin Laden

Hamdan ‘guilty’ of material support to terrorism, ‘not guilty’ of conspiracy, faces life sentence

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The jury in the Military Commission of al Qaeda member Salim Ahmed Hamdan announced its verdict this morning. The New York Times reports:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A panel of six military officers convicted a former driver for Osama bin Laden of a war crime Tuesday, completing the first military commission trial here and the first conducted by the United States since the end of World War II.

The military commission conviction of the former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was part of a select group of drivers and bodyguards for Mr. bin Laden until 2001, was a long-sought, if some what qualified, victory for the Bush administration, which has been working to begin military commission trials at the isolated naval base here for nearly seven years.

The commission acquitted Mr. Hamdan of a conspiracy charge, arguably the more serious of two charges he faced, but convicted him of a separate charge of providing material support for terrorism.

Mr. Hamdan was convicted by a panel of six senior military officers who, according to an order of the military judge, could not be public identified. As permitted under the law Congress passed for trials here in 2006, the trial included secret evidence and testimony in a closed courtroom.

Mr. Hamdan, who has said he is about 40, faces possible life term. The sentence is to be set in a separate proceeding before the same panel that is to begin this afternoon.