Running Out The Clock

by

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“The Bush administration is seeking to recall a military jury that gave a light sentence to Osama bin Laden’s driver in one of the first trials at Guantanamo Bay, arguing that the judge improperly credited the defendant for time he had already spent in the detention facility.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 40-year-old Yemeni captured in Afghanistan in November 2001, was sentenced in August to 66 months for providing material support to terrorism. The judge, Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred, credited the defendant with 61 months and eight days for time he had been detained at the U.S. military prison in Cuba, leaving Hamdan with an effective sentence of 142 days. Prosecutors had sought a 30-year term.

The government argues that Hamdan was not entitled to any credit for his pretrial detention because he was not held at Guantanamo Bay “in connection with the charges for which he was tried, but was independently detained under the law of armed conflict as an enemy combatant,” according to motions filed with the military court and released this week.

According to military prosecutors, that distinction also allows the government to hold any detainee even after he has been tried, convicted, sentenced and has served his time. The government said in court papers that prosecution for violations of the laws of war is an “incidental fact” to a detainee’s “wartime detention as an enemy combatant.””

You have to wonder why they are doing this. Hamdan has been tried, convicted, and sentenced. He was credited for time served. If my math is correct, his remaining sentence ends around the end of December. A few weeks later, a new administration will take office. Whoever wins the election, it’s hard for me to see how a new administration will not try to bring the United States back into conformity with its own laws, and with the treaties it has signed. If they do so, they will presumably end up releasing Hamdan.

Are they just trying to run out the clock? Can they not admit that they went to court and did not get everything they wanted? Why waste everyone’s time doing this? Do prosecutors and judges have nothing better to do?

24 thoughts on “Running Out The Clock”

  1. Whoever wins the election, it’s hard for me to see how a new administration will not try to bring the United States back into conformity with its own laws

    I wish I had your confidence, considering that one of the possibilities has a VP candidate out ridiculing concern about “reading terrorists their rights”.

  2. The government argues that Hamdan was not entitled to any credit for his pretrial detention because he was not held at Guantanamo Bay “in connection with the charges for which he was tried, but was independently detained under the law of armed conflict as an enemy combatant,”
    IANAL, but this strikes me as a real stretch. It’s like I’m held in the county jail during my trial (what for, you ask? Murder most foul!!!) and when I’m sentenced to the state penitentiary, I have to start all over because my time served was in a jail, not a penitentiary.
    That comparison hold?

  4. Perhaps they’re planning to be, according to them, the ones who tried to continue to be tough on terrorists and keep them safely locked up before the Traitor Liberals marched in and began Endangering America. The clock doesn’t stop when they go out of power. They may be positioning to be the opposition – by not conceding a thing.

  5. Can they not admit that they went to court and did not get everything they wanted?
    No. Look at the ridiculousness surrounding the Liberty City Seven (or six now, I guess) trial for corroboration.

  6. I was on a panel a couple weeks ago, talking about the impact of Boumediene, The pro-military law prof argued that the actual impact would be minimal because the government wasn’t even going to seriously contest 75-80% of cases.
    Sorry, wrong. They are fighting tooth and nail on absolutely everything, screwing up their own policy as they go. Some of this is Cheney and, I think we can now say, Mukasey, being stubborn. More, though, is that this is what you get when you dragoon 100 government lawyers from their normal positions to work on these cases. No temp is going to exercise judgment, nor does any want to be the one that let any little detail get away. So people who don’t have the background or experience to tell what cr*p in the file has already been rejected by intelligent people end up repeating whatever they find that looks good.

  8. It’s the Josef Stalin school of government. Never admit wrongdoing, never admit error, and if anything goes wrong, the Wreckers are to blame.

  9. You have to wonder why they are doing this.
    Do I really? This is just another example of the cowardice of the Cheney-Bush administration.
    That’s not a generic insult. I am not calling Cheney and Bush “cowards” in the same offhand way that they labelled Atta and company cowards. I mean it in the literal sense: Dick and Dubya are afraid. They are afraid of the consequences of another al-Qaida attack in the US.
    I don’t mean the physical consequesnces, I mean the political ones. They got a pass for 9/11 happening on their watch. They made political hay out of having “prevented” another 9/11. They have tortured hundreds, killed thousands, inconvenienced millions, and eavesdropped on god knows how many, with about as much result as Aztec priests sacrificing virgins to prevent the volcano from erupting. The volcano not erupting is taken by the yokels as proof that the witchdoctors must be doing something useful. The calamity the witchdoctors fear is not rivers of lava and clouds of ash; it’s that the yokels might catch on to the scam, if the volcano does erupt. Dick and Dubya are scared to death that al-Qaida will hit us again before they leave office — or more precisely, that they will be blamed if it happens. Their best bet, they figure, is to keep sacrificing virgins. After all, it’s worked this far!
    Don’t get me wrong: I fear another al-Qaida attack, too. And I have more reason to worry about such an attack killing or maiming me in the suburbs of Boston than “real Americans”, living in the “pro-American” small towns of “the heartland” do. But I am not enough of a coward to want my government to keep random people locked up on the theory that hey, it couldn’t hurt.
    –TP

  10. TP, I agree with the comment about cowardice … but you’ve got the wrong cowardice. Heaven knows that the fate of this guy has no possible impact on future terrorism, and if (FSM forfend) a terrorist act were to occur, the last question anyone would ask would be how their possible leniency towards Hamdan might have contributed.
    No, it’s a moral cowardice. They don’t want to be held responsible for releasing this schmuck. They don’t want to have to make a decision, to take responsibility. Much easier to insist Hamdan is due another 61 months in Limbo than to admit that it’s time to release him, and to figure out how, and what it means for all the other people in Gitmo.
    I wonder how these monsters sleep at night, knowing the perversions of justice they have perpetrated. Not Dubya, really, because I suspect his limited curiosity and his religious certainty carry him through; but those educated, allegedly smart people like Yoo, people who understand the reasons for a right of Habeas Corpus, who understand that Kafka wrote more than a funny story about a big bug. About them, I really wonder.

  13. Whoever wins the election, it’s hard for me to see how a new administration will not try to bring the United States back into conformity with its own laws, and with the treaties it has signed.
    Obama will win the election. But if McCain and Palin form the new administration – as they may, regardless of who wins – I do not share your confidence that they will have any interest in reversing the Bush/Cheney trend towards fascism. And if Obama wins by a large enough margin to overcome Republican voterigging, he may face a hostile House and Senate determined to let Obama do nothing but fight impeachment for whatever “crime” they can discover evidence of.
    I don’t understand why you find that hard to believe.
    Are they just trying to run out the clock? Can they not admit that they went to court and did not get everything they wanted? Why waste everyone’s time doing this? Do prosecutors and judges have nothing better to do?
    This is the same Bush/Cheney administration that began the policy of kidnapping, extra-judicial imprisonment, and torture. Of course they’re trying to run out the clock. Of course they can’t admit that the court didn’t justify them. Of course they don’t see that there’s anything better for prosecutors and judges to do than to support the US administration.
    Bush and Cheney have both said, repeatedly, in public, at a time when they both must have known the true status of many of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, that all the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay were “bad men”, the “worst of the worst”. They will never admit that they were wrong about this.

  14. Hate to be a nitpicker here, but:
    What law of armed conflict would that be? Not the stuff they work out (and mis-call law when there’s no power behind it) in Geneva.
    The purpose of inventing the phrase “unlawful combatant” is to eliminate all law in the treatment of prisoners. As is the holding of prisoners off shore. Duh.

  15. Sometimesw when a person does something bad, the person feels a need to keep on doing bad because to stop calls into question the behavior whereas to keep going affirms the behavior. The worse the behavior is, the more the person has to keep doing it in order to avoid any openning for questrions.

  16. What law of armed conflict would that be?
    Imagine a real war, like WW II. If we’d tried and convicted a German POW for war crimes, his sentece wouldn’t take into acount the time he’d spent as a POW. And, even if acquitted, the POW would not be entitled to release before the war was over.
    There are some obvious problems applying reasoning like that to a case like Hamdan’s–Who are we at war with? And when will the war be over?
    But that’s the adminstration’s reasoning in a nutshell: We’re at war, we’re entitled under international law to hold prisoners of war until the war is over, and the nature of the war we are fighting is such that it will never be over.

  18. TP and WT,
    Cowardice, but of a much more personal kind. If they admit to error, they would have to admit to having broken the law. Which puts them in line for prison time themselves. Especially with their approach to treatment of prisoners, that has to be a horror to contemplate.

  20. Any chance folks here might read my blog
    Hey, Gary, I do read your blog on occasion, and I’d comment sometimes, if you didn’t have to register to do that. But mostly, for my daily dose of Farbering, I come here.

  21. You have to wonder why they are doing this.
    Maybe they’re just a bunch of nasty jerks, and they enjoy delivering one more sharp poke in the eye to folks who stood up to their crap.
    There is no practical benefit to it, to them or any one else. They just like sticking it to folks they don’t like.
    That’s my take.
    Thanks –

  22. Gary, I’ve tried repeatedly in the last week to comment on your blog, but can’t get the comment box to open — no response when I click ‘post comment’. Doesn’t seem to make a difference whether I’m logged in to Blogger at the time or not.

  23. “Gary, I’ve tried repeatedly in the last week to comment on your blog, but can’t get the comment box to open — no response when I click ‘post comment’. ”
    I don’t know what software you’re suing. I’d suggest using Firefox, and Noscript, and allowing what you should allow, while not using any other security software like AVG or Norton or whathaveyou.
    Or doing someother combo of turning all that off.
    Me, I use them with exeptions set, but one never knows with these crapy software systems, adblogging software included.

Comments are closed.