N.Y. Times (August 10, 2008)

August 10, 2008

Editorial
The United States v. the Driver

Last week was hardly the first time that we have found ourselves scratching our heads in anguished confusion about what, exactly, President Bush is trying to achieve by trashing the Constitution at Guantánamo Bay. But the sentencing of Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, to five and a half years in prison is a good moment to stop and reflect.

For years, Mr. Bush and his supporters have been telling the world that it is necessary to hold prisoners without charges, to abuse them in ways most civilized nations consider torture, and to deny them basic human rights because of the serious threat they pose to America. These are “dangerous terrorists captured on the battlefield,” Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said in a statement on Wednesday.

The administration considered Mr. Hamdan such a priority that it took his case all the way to the Supreme Court, insisting Mr. Bush had the power to hold anyone he deemed an enemy combatant for as long as he wanted under any conditions he wanted. Mr. Hamdan’s trial was the first by a military commission in Guantánamo.

We use the word “trial” loosely. The proceedings were marked by secret testimony by secret witnesses. The former chief prosecutor in Guantánamo testified that he quit after being told that these trials could not produce acquittals. In the end, Mr. Hamdan was found guilty only of providing material support to terrorists and was sentenced to five and half years — a term he might complete before year’s end. Still, in the twisted world of Mr. Bush’s prison camps, it is unclear if Mr. Hamdan will be released after serving his sentence.

Mr. Hamdan, however, is hardly a high value target. The comedian Stephen Colbert captured the absurdity of the proceedings perfectly on Thursday night when he called the trial “the most historic session of traffic court ever.” It will not be long, Mr. Colbert added, “before we track down Ayman al-Zawahiri’s dermatologist.”

Mr. Colbert’s dark humor was a fitting coda to a case that illuminated so much of what is wrong with Guantánamo and the administration’s war on terrorism.

Mr. Bush would like to be remembered for his leadership in fighting terrorism, but his decisions have defied common sense, including his dismissal of the fact that Mr. bin Laden remains at large. In a 2002 press conference, he said, “I just don’t spend that much time on him.” In 2006, he told conservative columnists that sending troops “stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.”

Mr. Bush is operating according to a logic that says the right way to win against Al Qaeda is to invade Iraq, which had no connection to Al Qaeda. And the right way to dismantle Mr. bin Laden’s terrorism network is to express unconcern about chasing him down while relentlessly pursuing his driver.

Mr. Bush’s hapless, and often unconstitutional, approach to combating terrorism will leave his successor a great deal of work to do. The rule of law, including fair and open trials, must be restored. Guantánamo needs to be shut down, as Mr. McCain has said many times. Detainees must be put on trial quickly in real courts, and those who are not guilty must be freed.

There are some evidently dangerous men in Guantánamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of being the organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks. But it is hard to see a real trial ever taking place for Mr. Mohammed, who was subject to waterboarding and other abuse during interrogation, and the priority assigned to a small fish like Mr. Hamdan makes us wonder whether the administration has powerful cases against the hundreds of other Guantánamo detainees.

Mr. Bush’s supporters have been crowing over the Hamdan verdict as if it were some kind of a triumph. In truth, it is a hollow victory in the war on terror, a blow to America’s standards of justice and image in the world.