'A Long Way From Nuremberg'

Salim Hamdan, who served as Osama bin Laden's driver and was convicted at Guantánamo last week of providing material support for terrorism, could be back in his native Yemen before President Bush leaves office in January, according to his lawyers. Hamdan, 40, was the first Al Qaeda detainee to receive a full-blown trial at Guantánamo. A six-member military panel sentenced him last Thursday to 66 months in prison, minus time served (61 months). But it will be up to the Pentagon to decide whether to release Hamdan. The Bush administration has long held that it can continue imprisoning Al Qaeda members—even if they've served their sentence—until the War on Terror is over.

Hamdan's sentencing ended a six-year legal ordeal that was marked by courtroom victories and procedural setbacks. In a case filed by his lawyers to the Supreme Court, justices ruled in 2006 that Guantánamo military commissions lacked the authority to try him and other Al Qaeda detainees. Congress responded later that year by passing the Military Commissions Act, which formed the legal basis for the trials.

Journalist Jonathan Mahler is the author of a new book on Hamdan and his legal odyssey titled "The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight for Presidential Power" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The author spoke with NEWSWEEK's Dan Ephron. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What did you make of the 66-month sentence?
Jonathan Mahler: I was surprised. It was a very light sentence. I thought it was a real vindication for the work his defense lawyers had done, this group of people that includes military lawyers, a law professor and corporate lawyers from Seattle who did the work pro bono. To me that was the most heartening thing about this whole experience, that this guy, an accused and now convicted terrorist, the driver for Osama bin Laden, who is certainly the most evil man alive, would get such a vigorous defense by lawyers, including military lawyers.

Hamdan was acquitted of the conspiracy charge. What does the split verdict say?
Well, to me it says the government didn't do its job very well. If this was the first guy they were able to bring before these military tribunals, for which they basically wrote the rules and took great care in choosing the defendant, and they were unable to get him convicted on the more serious of the two charges, I think it says the government failed to do its job properly.

But all along the government said that there could be acquittals. Maybe this is actually a sign that the system works?
I don't think they expected to launch these historic war-crimes trials, the first war-crimes trials since World War II, with an acquittal on the more serious of the two charges. The whole importance of war-crimes trials is their symbolic significance, the message they send the world. If the first guy who had been trotted out at Nuremberg had been acquitted on one of two charges—first of all the notion that the first guy at Nuremberg would have been a driver for Hitler is on its face kind of laughable—but then the notion that he would have been acquitted would have been an international embarrassment, frankly.