Osama Bin Laden's Driver

Osama Bin Laden's driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was recently found guilty of supporting terrorism by a military tribunal tasked with prosecuting the Guantanamo prisoners. After all these years, after the threat of terrorism in America and the assault on our personal liberties at home led by Bush and Cheney, we have marched the driver out to face Military Justice.

It has not gone unnoticed that Hitler's driver was not prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials.

The fact that radical Islam preys on the poor and ignorant (Hamdan is a Yemeni with a fourth grade education) seems to require that he be held in super-secret double-dare detention along with the other "important" and "significant" prisoners in Guantanamo. You never know when he might require waterboarding.

Who else is kept under confinement there? The maid? The gardener? A Catholic?

The word 'justice' (and those responsible for dispensing it) does not seem to carry much honor or importance under the current administration, especially when you acknowledge the debacle at the Justice Department.

When I look at Hamdan, I wonder about what the penalty should be for, example, lying about Iraq trying to purchase "yellowcake" uranium, or having WMDs, or for outing the career intelligence agent Valerie Plame?

Bush and Cheney seem to have it backwards. The things that make America great are not small and petty, and the small and petty things that make them both what they are, well, those things are not great.