As military officers responsive to a chain of command, he said, Hamdan's jurors are "well versed in setting aside raw emotion in determining fact" and will heed instructions from the military judge, Navy Capt. Keith J. Allred.
The verdict, however, is likely to make little difference to Hamdan. President Bush has labeled him an "enemy combatant" and ordered him held for the duration of the global war on terrorism.
Officers of the Joint Task Force that administers the prison and interrogation network at Guantanamo are preparing a special, undisclosed place for Hamdan in his post-trial status, said Rear Adm. Dave Thomas, the task force commander.
"Guilty or convicted or whatever, they would be housed in a different facility," Thomas said of any detainees who complete the war crimes process. No new construction is envisioned at the detention center, but any adjudicated prisoners "would be held separate from the other detainees."
Detention policymakers here and in Washington insist that none of the Guantanamo prisoners lives in solitary confinement. Most live in cells with cement walls and steel doors, in an echo chamber of cellblocks with bare floors.
Asked how Hamdan could be segregated from the rest of the approximately 265 prisoners yet not be in solitary confinement, Thomas said he would "cross that bridge when I come to it."
Another irony of Guantanamo is that the judge is weighing a formula for recognizing the time Hamdan has already served for potential sentence reduction in the event that he is convicted. But even if he should be sentenced to less time than he's already served, he'll still be imprisoned until the open-ended war on terrorism is over -- unless a new administration rescinds Bush's order.
Hamdan's defense was encumbered by "protective orders" that prohibited even the mention of the CIA or its handling of Hamdan during a month in late 2001 when the defendant disappeared into "a black hole" in Afghanistan, said the tribunal's deputy defense chief, Michael J. Berrigan. He called the two-week trial an "obscenity."
"What's the purpose here? Mr. Hamdan is going to be held until the government wants to release him," Berrigan said. "It really has no connection to the underlying reality."
Citing national security concerns, none of the agents nor the reports from CIA interrogations of Hamdan were available to the defense. Four prosecution witnesses testified anonymously, and two Army special forces officers called by the defense were questioned behind closed doors, with no media or independent observers allowed.
