ike/ Response to Hamdan

I quote from Jane Mayer's excellent book, "The Dark Side." This from chapter 8:

"The CIA, concerned by the paucity of valuable information emanating from the island,(Guantanamo) in the late summer of 2002 dispatched a senior intelligence analyst, who was fluent in Arabic and expert on Islamic extremism, to find out what the problem was...The report he wrote up...is classified top secret. But after he left the Agency, he described what he found. After spending several hours with each of about two dozen Arabic-speaking detainees, chosen in a random sampling, he concluded that an estimated one-third of the prison camp's population of more than 600 captives at the time, meaning more than 200 individuals, had no connection to terrorism whatsoever. If the intelligence haul was meager, his findings suggested, one reason was that many of the detainees knew little to nothing...Many, he felt sure, 'were just caught in a dragnet. They were not fighters, they were not doing jihad. They should not have been there...'

A later study undertaken by a team of law students and attorneys at Seton Hall University Law School bolstered the CIA officer's anecdotal impressions. After reviewing 517 of the Guantanamo detainees' cases in depth, they concluded that only 8 percent were alleged to have associated with Al Qaeda. Fifty-five percent were not alleged to have engaged in any hostile act against the United States at all, and the remainder were charged with dubious wrongdoing, including having tried to flee U.S. bombs. The overwhelming majority--all but five percent--had been captured by non U.S. players, many of whom were bounty hunters." Endquote.

The Hamdan case is not a triumph of justice. It is not proof that military tribunals can administer fair trials. Its outcome does not excuse or condone any of the absurd activities of the Bush administration's last seven years. In fact, a Pentagon spokesman has gone on record stating that when Hamdan's sentence is complete, his status may return to that of an "enemy combatant" where he can be held indefinitely by the United States government.

The logic used to hold Salim Hamdan, to punish Salim Hamdan, is the same logic used by Osama bin Laden to justify killing innocent Americans. According to bin Laden, the American government did evil things so anyone supporting it (taxpayers) was evil too. The only crime that the thousands of innocent victims of 9/11 committed was living, breathing and working in a system deemed evil by a leader wholly dedicated to bringing down that system.

Hamdan's crime was perhaps being born in Afghanistan, or perhaps it was living at a time where he needed to work in the employ of a murderous man to support his family. He testified that he was "shocked" when he found out about the 9/11 attacks. "It was a sorry or sad thing to see innocent people killed," he said at his trial. "I don't know what could be given or presented to these innocent people who were killed in the U.S. I personally present my apologies to them, if anything what I did have caused them pain."

It was Nietzsche who said, "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

It has never been more true.