The United States v. the Driver
A
New York Times editorial published Sunday, August 10, 2008.
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.
