the Hamdan farce

The headline of the London Times says it all: "Bin Laden driver gets 66 months - but will never be released." Scott Horton does a good job explaining the difference between the Nuremberg trials and the Guantanamo farce -- here.

Hamdan was convicted of "material support for terrorism" because he was Bin Laden's driver and bodyguard from 1998 until 2001. As Marty Lederman explains:

The government's argument is that any attempt, like this one, to aid in the killing of U.S. forces on a battlefield is a violation of the laws of armed conflict if it is committed by an unprivileged combatant, i.e., a nonuniformed person.

This is a fairly radical theory -- that any belligerency by nonprivileged persons is itself a war crime. If I'm not mistaken, it would mean that CIA officials and many U.S. Special Forces are not only regularly violating the domestic laws of the nations where they operate, but are committing war crimes. Can that be right?

Oops. Time to amend the arrest warrants.