By Amol Rajan and Arifa Akbar, Independent UK Posted on August 15, 2008 Alternet dot orgHe boasts of being Barack Obama's "BlackBerry buddy", never mind a UN Commissioner for Peace and a driving force behind the Save Darfur campaign.
In the latest incarnation of his irrepressible political instincts, the Hollywood actor George Clooney may find himself gnawing at a raw nerve. He has bought the film rights to a book chronicling the life and trial of Salim Hamdan, the Yemen-born driver and bodyguard of Osama bin Laden who was jailed last week for five-and-a-half years for supporting terror.
The Challenge, written by the American journalist Jonathan Mahler, documents the long campaign by the U.S. navy lawyer Charles Swift and the Georgetown law professor Neal Katyal to ensure a fair trial for Hamdan.
Clooney, who has starred in such overtly political films as Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck, paid an undisclosed sum, probably more than seven figures, on behalf of Smoke House, the production company he founded with the actor and film producer Grant Heslov.
Mahler said last night that he was "really excited," adding: "George Clooney is clearly an outstanding film-maker and I've got no doubt he's going to do a fantastic job with this."
Hamdan's sentence was the first to be delivered in a full war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, the American prison in Cuba. Proponents of Washington's "war on terror" considered the 66-month jail term too lenient; human rights activists protested that he had served his time -- he had already spent seven years in US custody.
American gossip columns buzz with rumors that Clooney -- whose performance as the brooding, eponymous hero of legal thriller Michael Clayton earned him an Oscar nomination last year -- will play Swift himself. Should he choose to do so at such a politically loaded time, and were he to portray Swift sympathetically, Clooney could be making the most overtly political intervention of his career to date.
"I think Swift has taken a lot of people by surprise," Mahler said. "He had been a minor lawyer defending wayward service personnel on things like child molestation charges.
"Suddenly he's appointed by the Pentagon to defend an enemy combatant, and he ends up suing George W. Bush. It's difficult not to be impressed by his sense of duty, by the idea that justice transcends the allegiances of war. I'm sure that's part of the appeal to George Clooney."
Mahler said the story fascinated him because Hamdan , 40, and Swift, "had this extraordinary relationship … Suddenly a man in a military uniform walks into his room one day and says 'Hi, I'm Charlie Swift. I'm your lawyer. You can trust me.'
Hamdan would go on hunger strike after hunger strike, and here was this man in a uniform literally trying to feed him and stop him from going mad. Several times Hamdan tried to sack the man who wanted to save him, but Swift refused to budge."
During Hamdan's sentencing, Swift appealed for his client to be able visit his family in Yemen. Rather than reject the request, Captain Keith Allred, the military judge, said it was a good idea, saying he hoped Hamdan would see his family soon.
The Challenge portrays Swift as a noble David, defeating the ignoble Goliath of Washington's neo-cons. His story has the ingredients of a classic Hollywood yarn: emerging from obscurity, Swift was expected to mount the sort of legal case befitting a man of his inexperience. Instead, he took Hamdan to the Supreme Court -- and won. And yet the victory cost him his marriage and led to his being overlooked for promotion.
© 2008 Independent UK All rights reserved.
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Waste, Not Justice: The Hamdan Tribunal
On August 6, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the defendant in the first war crimes trial in the U.S. since World War II, was convicted of material support for terrorism. His sentence of five-and-a-half years, delivered the following day, was a rebuke to the Bush administration, which sought a 30-year sentence. With credit for time already served in the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Hamdan will be eligible for release in just five months.
Hamdan was not convicted on all charges, however. In fact, he was acquitted of all the original charges brought by the government, including conspiracy to aid a terrorist organization. Congress added "material support," never previously considered a war crime, to the war crimes list when it passed the Military Commissions Act (MCA) in 2006.
What did Hamdan do to provide material support for terrorism? He acted as Osama bin Laden's driver and bodyguard, which the panel of six hand-picked military officers that convicted him believed he did "knowing that by providing said services or transportation he was directly facilitating communications and planning for acts of terrorism." However, as The New York Times reported, his lawyers argued at the trial that Hamdan, a Yemeni with only a fourth-grade education, was simply trying to support his family:
Defense lawyers argued that there was no evidence that Mr. Hamdan, a Yemeni with a fourth-grade education, was involved in planning any Qaeda operations or had advance knowledge of the specifics of any planned attacks. They claimed that his role as a driver was just a job for a father of two who "had to earn a living."
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and another Guantanamo Bay detainee, stated in written testimony submitted at the tribunal that Hamdan was "primitive," "not fit to plan or execute" al Qaeda's terrorist activities, and didn't share bin Laden's ideology.
Despite all the evidence showing the insignificance of Hamdan's role in al Qaeda, the battle for his freedom may not be over yet. According to the Associated Press
The Defense Department insists it has a right to hold "enemy combatants" who are considered to pose a threat to the United States - even those cleared of charges or given short sentences in the military tribunals at Guantanamo.
The military officers who convicted and sentenced Hamdan are angry that the administration can simply ignore their decision; as one put it, "After all the effort that we put in to get somebody a fair trial…and then to say no matter what we did it didn't matter - I don't see that as a positive step." The fact that Hamdan may not go free when his sentence is up in December - despite calls from the people who convicted him that the sentence be respected - casts even more doubt on the fairness of the military tribunals.
With the Hamdan trial over, the government's next step is prosecuting Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was just 15 years old in 2002 when he is alleged to have thrown a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. In an interrogation video released by the government, Khadr says he was inside a house at the time of the incident, not in the firefight.
The government has spent vast amounts of time and resources preparing for these tribunals, including securing passage of the MCA so that it could charge lowly drivers and potentially innocent teenagers with "war crimes." It is clear that neither the resources spent on these tribunals nor the hollow victory of Hamdan's short sentence are in the interest of national security. These efforts are for show; they do not make our country safer.
This wastefulness is just another illustration of why we so desperately need a People's Campaign for the Constitution. The government's actions have shown that they have an egregious disregard not only for our civil liberties and constitutional protections, but also for our safety and our taxpayer dollars. We, the people, must come together from across the political spectrum and stand up to our government. We must remind them that their job is to uphold the Constitution and protect us from terrorism, yes, but also from unchecked government power. We must make our congressional representatives feel the pressure of a national movement as well as local coalitions in their home districts. We must hold them accountable for using resources wisely, not to detain and prosecute innocent people who had little or nothing to do with perpetrating terrorist acts, but to increase our nation's security without sacrificing the freedoms that make America the great country it has always been.
The above was taken from a Bill of Rights Defense Committee Newsletter sent out August 15, 2008
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