GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY!!!!!

Or so screamed all of the headlines this week when the verdict came down on Salim Hamdan, the driver/chauffeur for Osama Bin Laden. (Remember him? Tall skinny Arab dude, hooked up to a dialysis machine? Used to make videotapes? Masterminded the 9-11 attacks? Yeah, that guy.)

You would think that Hamdan was found guilty of any variety and number of crimes against humanity, what with all that breathless reporting on the guilty verdict, not only from the usual suspects (Faux News) but from the MSM/SCLM as well.

But what was poor Salim actually found guilty of? Apparently it's a crime to be Salim Hamdan, a chauffeur for the forgotten leader of The Terra (how could we have a War on Terra^tm without him?), since that's about all they could finally gin up out of all of those charges to convict him on.

So, bottom line, Hamdan is hardly the criminal terrorist mastermind/murderer/etc. that the Bush-Cheney Assholes of Evil coalition tried to make him out to be, is he now?

In fact, Salim was sentenced to about five-and-a-half years in prison for being...well, for being Salim Hamdan, with -- and this is the good part -- credit for time served!

Which means that Salim will be getting could have gotten out of Gitmo in just a few months. But, silly boy, don't count your yogurt before it's fermented. The BFEE says that it will keep Hamdan under lock and key regardless, long past his release date, essentially forever, since it would send "the wrong message" to the "terrorists" to release him when his sentence has been served...

And what message would that be? Well, it's like I said a long time ago. Baby Doc said "'they' hate us for our freedoms", and then he began immediately to dismantle those freedoms, apparently under the theory that if we no longer have our freedoms, "they" won't hate us and the War on Terra^tm will be over.

Hmmmm..... Now that sounds an awful lot like "appeasement" to me.

Oh, and that verdict and sentencing came from the military tribunal which was deliberately constituted to sidestep and bypass all of those pesky constitutional issues surrounding our precious Gitmo "detainees". But the officers on that panel, when they first joined the military, took an oath to "preserve and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign AND DOMESTIC".

It's encouraging that those guys are still taking that oath seriously; it's alarming that the military seems to be the only federal institution that still believes in the Constitution.