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Salim Hamdan was just sentenced to five and half years for chauffeuring Osama bin Laden through McDonald’s drive-thrus, or whatever the Afghani equivalent is, while he plotted the 9/11 attacks. Hamdan has been holed up in Guantanamo Bay for over five years without a trial, so he’s actually eligible for release in five months, although Bush & Co. have threatened to hold him indefinitely after he has served him time. The media has been all over the story because 1) Not every programming minute can be filled by the Olympics; and 2) It potentially sets a precedent for suspected terrorists...

George Clooney, one of Hollywood's most prominent backers of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama for president, has bought the movie rights to tell the story of Osama bin Laden's driver. According to the report in the Guardian, the book sympathetically portrays Hamdan and his Navy lawyer, Charles Swift, as the little guys up against the powerful forces of the United States government. Clooney, who is reportedly offering policy and speaking advice plus also helping Obama raise money from within the wealthy, liberal Hollywood community, is said to covet the role of Swift for himself.

An officer who served on the Guantánamo Bay military jury that convicted Salim Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism and sentenced to five months imprisonment on top of 61 months he has already spent in confinement at the military base awaiting trial tells The Wall Street Journal that the evidence against Osama bin Laden's former driver “simply didn't support prosecutors' depiction of a hard-core al Qaeda terrorist who hates America and its way of life” and that “along the spectrum” of terrorist activity, Hamdan fell on the “less significant end.”According to The Journal, this juror also insisted that the...

Hollywood A-lister George Clooney is planning to bring the story of Osama bin Laden's driver to the big screen. The actor's production company, Smokehouse, has bought the rights to a book about Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Hamdan, according to The Observer newspaper. The Challenge by journalist Jonathan Mahler chronicles Hamdan's capture and imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay and his subsequent trial, defended by a US navy lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. Charles Swift. Hamdan, from Yemen, was sentenced last week to 5 1/2 years in jail. It was the first sentence handed down to a Guantanamo Bay detainee by a U.S. military tribunal....

George Clooney, already one of Hollywood's leading liberal voices, has embarked on what may be one of his most controversial projects: the story of Osama bin Laden's driver. Clooney's production company, Smokehouse, has bought the rights to a book about Salim Hamdan, an inmate at Guantánamo Bay who last week was sentenced to jail for his role in helping the al-Qaeda leader. The book, The Challenge, is by journalist Jonathan Mahler and tells the story of Hamdan's capture and trial, defended by a US navy lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift. It has had a big critical success. Last week Yemen-born...

The verdict in the first war crimes trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is in: One poorly educated Yemeni, with an impish sense of humor and two little girls, is guilty of supporting terrorism by driving Osama bin Laden. With credit for time served, the sentence is no more than five months. The verdict and the five-and-a-half-year sentence may not have been as severe as the government had hoped for, but it was a green light for a tribunal that the Pentagon plans to use to prosecute as many as 80 detainees, including five men charged as the plotters and coordinators...

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...

It is the world terror roundup. Bill Roggio from LWJ checks in to examine Hamdan, Roundups of High Value Targets in Afghanistan, Iraq, China and Russia/Georgia.

In an astounding finale to the first military-commission trial, Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s personal aide, has been sentenced by a military commission to five-and-a-half years in prison — five-and-a-half years — upon conviction for the war crime of providing material support to al-Qaeda.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 7, 2008 – The first detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to have his case brought to trial was sentenced today by a military panel there to 66 months in prison for providing material support to terrorism. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who served as Osama bin Laden’s driver, was tried and sentenced under the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Following a two-week trial, a military jury yesterday found Hamdan guilty of providing material support to terrorism, but not of the more serious charge of conspiracy. Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the military judge, sentenced him to 66 months confinement but...

Update: After all the MSM ranting of an unfair trial, Hamdan gets 66 months including five years and a month time already served. As soon as Salim Ahmed Hamdan was convicted Wednesday, July 6, there were several things expected

A military jury gave Osama bin Laden's driver a stunningly lenient sentence on Thursday, making him eligible for release in just five months despite the prosecutors' request for a sentence tough enough to frighten terrorists around the globe.

The military tribunal verdict convicting Salim Hamdan of providing material support to terrorism was eminently just. The guy was, after all, Osama Bin Laden's driver, and he was, after all, arrested with two surface-to-air missiles in the back of his car. And there was, after all, the video of a 1998 Al Qaeda news conference for Pakistani journalists that at one point showed Hamdan with a machine gun and at another juncture captured him smiling at Bin Laden. And there were, after all, the undisputed facts that Hamdan fell in with Bin Laden in 1996 and worked with him through...

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A panel of six military officers convicted a former driver for Osama bin Laden of one of two war crimes charges on Wednesday but acquitted him of the other, completing the first military commission trial here and the first conducted by the United States since the aftermath of World War II.

The first al-Qaida suspect charged at Guantánamo was today found guilty of aiding terrorism at a specially convened tribunal. These military commissions, however, have been highly controversial. Do you believe justice is being done at Camp Justice?

Can post link only. Your gag reflex is your responsibility.

ARLINGTON, VA -- U.S. Senator John McCain issued the following statement on today's verdict in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan: "I welcome today's guilty verdict in the first trial held under the Military Commissions Act (MCA). This process of bringing terrorists to justice has been too long delayed, but I'm encouraged that it is finally moving forward. I supported that legislation, which was a good-faith effort by Congress to meet the Supreme Court's direction to establish a process to bring terrorist detainees to trial. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a trusted confidante of Osama Bin Laden, was provided a full hearing...

Why is it, that the impression the media leaves me with, is that Hamdan is "just a driver" and a victim of circumstances? Just another tragic pawn and casualty in the illegal and immoral war instigated by the imperialistic, oil-grubbing, human-rights/U.S. Constitution-violating Bush regime? Well, he's been found guilty of supporting terrorism, but acquitted on charges of conspiracy to commit acts of terror. Anyway... Jonathan Mahler writing last Sunday for the NYTimes Magazine: The men in the dock might very well be war criminals, the argument goes, but what about the policy makers and interrogators who violated their rights...

The following is a statement by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on the Military Commission ’s guilty verdict in the Salim Hamdan case. “I commend the military officers who presided over this trial and served on the hearing panel under difficult and unprecedented circumstances. They and all our Armed Forces continue to serve this country with valor in the fight against terrorism. That the Hamdan trial — the first military commission trial with a guilty verdict since 9/11 — took several years of legal challenges to secure a conviction for material support for terrorism underscores the dangerous flaws in the...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...