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Four and a half years later, Hamdan is still at Guantánamo, but Swift's prediction has proved correct. A Yemeni man in his late 30s, Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, was at the center of perhaps the Supreme Court's most important decision on presidential power ever. He is now the first defendant in America's first war-crimes trial since World War II. Hamdan stands accused of providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy. If convicted, he could face life in prison...
...despite landing in the middle of a historic legal drama, Hamdan is largely unknown to the American public. It remains unclear whether he was a dedicated lieutenant of bin Laden's--"a body man for bin Laden," as one of the government's lawyers once described him to me--or, as his defense lawyers claim, little more than a lowly foot soldier. I have been following Hamdan's story since early 2004, when I started writing a book about his case, and have spent hundreds of hours interviewing his lawyers, his family, his mentor and his interrogator. From these conversations...
...once publicly announced, "I'm gay and that's a good thing." Jarring as that headline may be, it partly explains why Obama is likely to receive the warmest welcome given to any senior American politician in Berlin since Kennedy visited in 1963 and made his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech...
...serious legal setback this week - this time, not at the hands of any civilian judges but by the ruling of one of the military's own jurists. Navy Judge Captain Keith Allred, hearing the first U.S. military commission trial since World War II, tossed out statements by Osama bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, because he believes they were obtained under "highly coercive" conditions. That doesn't bode well for future tribunals in cases where U.S. interrogators used even harsher techniques - such as the waterboarding used on confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - to extract confessions from suspected...
...wrong. Hamdan had also been in U.S. custody since his capture and had not been rendered to any foreign countries for interrogation, which might have opened the door for his defense lawyer to raise questions about his treatment. And his story certainly had narrative appeal: Hamdan had been with bin Laden between 1996 and 2001, a stretch of time that spanned not just 9/11 but al-Qaeda's 1998 attacks on two embassies in East Africa and the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen...