Word: hamdan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 al-Qaeda members...
...Legal experts inside and outside the Pentagon were scrambling Tuesday to figure out the impact of Captain Allred's Monday-night decision to bar statements Hamdan made after his capture in Afghanistan in late 2001. Hamdan had been bound hand and foot 24 hours a day, sometimes with a bag over his head, in what amounted to solitary confinement at Kabul's Bagram air base, Allred said in a 16-page ruling. "The interests of justice are not served by admitting these statements," Allred ruled, "because of the highly coercive environments and conditions under which they were made...
...spring of 2006, Hamdan's lawsuit, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, reached the Supreme Court. The justices handed Hamdan a sweeping victory, with the majority finding that the President's military tribunals were unlawful. But Hamdan's odyssey didn't end there. Rather than offer Hamdan a reduced sentence, the Administration redoubled its efforts, pressing Congress to authorize the military tribunals, which it did by passing the Military Commissions Act during the waning days of the Republican Congress in the fall of 2006. Hamdan was recharged under the Military Commissions Act and moved into a new maximum-security facility. There...
...lawyers' accounts, Hamdan's six years at Gitmo have left him a shell of a man. He has deteriorated mentally to the point where he can no longer meaningfully assist in his own criminal defense. He is suicidal, hears voices inside his head and talks to himself. And yet his trial, which is taking place in a small courtroom at Guantánamo Bay, will still influence the future of the tribunal system. Under the rules of the tribunal, Hamdan faces a jury of military officers who will decide his innocence or guilt. Whether their decision is perceived as fair...
...Jonathan Mahler's book, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power, from which this article is adapted, will be published in early August...