Just a few minutes ago, Special Contributor wrote The ACLU are sure to crying about human rights violations any minute now. Yup!
After a trial filled with overwhelming constitutional and procedural flaws, a jury of military officers today found Salim Hamdan guilty of providing material support for terrorism. The American Civil Liberties Union has been at Guantánamo Bay observing the Hamdan proceedings, which lacked the fundamental legal safeguards found in traditional U.S. courts or military courts governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Followed by bloviation and terrorist love from Anthony Romero.
The Center For Constitutional Law is also pitching a hissy fit.
And in a large surprise to me, Firedoglake is weepy about this conviction. But don't say that the Left supports terrorism. That would be mean.
Hamdan's case has been a test in several ways. He challenged his detention, forcing Congress and the Bush administration to re-engineer the tribunals twice. As a driver, he had less obvious culpability for the deaths of thousands of American civilians than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In the end, the verdict recognized the differences. They put aside emotion and acquitted him of being a member of the AQ conspiracy in these attacks, but recognized his role in supporting the organization.
Essentially, they recognized Hamdan as a smaller part of the terrorist group, but that doesn't absolve him from responsibility for his support of AQ. The verdict demonstrates that the Gitmo tribunals are not kangaroo courts, and that justice can be found in this process.
Justice was served, despite how much the ACLU cries about it. The fact that these terrorist defending lawyers think foreign terrorists deserve constitutional rights is absolutely abhorent. That they convinced SCOTUS to grant them is even scarier.
Lawhawk is on the same page:
Considering that terrorists caught on the battlefield are not a class of individuals protected under the Geneva Conventions, and would have been summarily executed in prior conflicts, the lengths to which the US has gone to provide rights to these terrorists - up to and including habeas access to US courts undermines the arguments by the defense. Hamdan has had more bites of the apple of justice than most defendants could ever hope to achieve in traditional criminal justice cases.
Cry me a river about the tactics that include sleep deprivation and solitary confinement. Hamdan admits that he was Osama's driver, but claims that he was a mere lackey and didn't partake in Osama's jihad against the US.
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