It was impossible to be surprised that Salim Hamdan, driver to Osama bin Laden, would not be convicted by a military tribunal that was ordered to convict him.  Orders are orders.  But when he was sentenced to 66 months imprisonment, that was a surprise.

The prosecution sought 30 years.  Hamdan was credited with time served, and has 5 months left.  Someone isn’t getting another star on their uniform.

My old friend Andy McCarthy wasn’t pleased at all.  As he wrote in the National Review :

In an astounding finale to the first military-commission trial, Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s personal aide, has been sentenced by a military commission to five-and-a-half years in prison — five-and-a-half years — upon conviction for the war crime of providing material support to al-Qaeda.

It gets worse. The military judge, Naval Captain Keith Allred, has decided that Hamdan should be credited with the five years he has already spent in custody.

In effect, the jury’s shameful 66-month sentence is thus reduced to a shocking six months — for key assistance to a terror network that has killed thousands of Americans and continues plotting to kill more.

This guy must be one heck of a driver, to make Andy all apoplectic.  But while the hard right spews venom at this attack on American justice (where they probably wouldn’t have been happy unless he had gotten two death penalties, and had both carried out), there is a silver lining behind the gray cloud of justice.

According to CNN (via Turley),

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said after the verdict Wednesday that Hamdan was now a “convicted war criminal” and that he was “no longer considered an enemy combatant.”

But on Thursday, Whitman said Hamdan’s status would revert to “enemy combatant” when his sentence is completed.

As an enemy combatant, Hamdan can be held indefinitely by the United States.

Safe at last.  See Andy, you got yourself all worked up over nothing.  Here in America, we sentence you, you serve your sentence, then we just hold you until we’ve had enough of you.  It’s unclear what happens then, as he is likely to find himself ineligible for a hack license in New York City despite his conceded driving skills.

But Andy isn’t happy yet.  First, some “liberal” judges (who somehow infiltrated our military and rose to high rank) made a mockery of America:

In Hamdan’s case, we thus have a double problem. First, the jury of military officers somehow decided that material support to our enemies, by a guy who actually protected bin Laden and transported weapons for al-Qaeda, was worth only five-and-a-half years in jail. Second, the judge then made matters incalculably worse by effectively giving Hamdan what everyone (including the judge) must know will be taken as a get-out-of-jail card: i.e., full credit for the five years Hamdan has already been in custody as an enemy combatant. That turns the 66 months into six months.

But worse, America has cowed to the pressures of treating “war criminals” as if they were people!

Understand: there is no requirement to try captured enemy combatants for war crimes. As the laws of war have long provided, and as the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed, wartime enemy combatants may be held without trial for the duration of hostilities. War crimes charges are an additional measure against combatants who commit egregious law-of-war violations.

What would Andy have done if somebody hadn’t come up with the title “enemy combatants?”   After all, Hamdan doesn’t sound at all threatening if he called him “the guy who drove bin Laden around in a car.”  When all is said and done, Andy asks a very important question:

But all that said, how does a serious person continue to defend the military system after Hamdan?

This is why I think so highly of Andy McCarthy.  Despite our differences, we always find something to agree on.