GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, (NYT) — A panel of six military officers convicted a former driver for Osama bin Laden of one of two war crimes charges on Wednesday but acquitted him of the other, completing the first military commission trial here and the first conducted by the United States since the end of World War II.
In a setback for the military prosecutors, the commission acquitted the former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, of a conspiracy charge, arguably the more serious of the two charges he faced. At a trial that included references to the landmark Nuremberg war-crimes trials of Nazi leaders in the 1940s, Mr. Hamdan was convicted on a separate charge of providing material support for terrorism.
The split verdict gave both sides in the long debate over the procedures here grounds for their competing claims. Supporters said the system’s fairness was illustrated by the careful verdict, while critics said the trial, which featured secret evidence and closed proceedings, demonstrated the injustice of the Bush administration’s military commission system.
Mr. Hamdan, who has said he is about 40, could be sentenced by the panel to anything from no imprisonment to a life term. The sentence is to be determined after a separate proceeding before the same panel, which began Wednesday afternoon, after the announcement of the verdict. At that hearing, the defense worked to portray Mr. Hamdan sympathetically as a man with few choices who felt “betrayed by bin Laden” when he learned about terrorist attacks.
The sentence is expected to be announced as soon as Thursday. Its severity could provide an insight into the military panel’s view of the case, which has been criticized because Mr. Hamdan was a minor figure in Al Qaeda.
On Wednesday, the judge granted a defense request that Mr. Hamdan be credited for more than five years of pretrial confinement since he was first charged in 2003. If the panel imposes a short sentence, lawyers said, the administration would be under increased pressure to justify continuing to hold a detainee who might already have completed his term after a conviction.
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