Six Months for Hamdan? Scrap Military Trials

Salim Hamdan’s five-and-a-half-year prison sentence is a "stunningly unjust" joke, writes an enraged Andrew McCarthy in the National Review, especially because bin Laden’s driver will eligible for release in 6 months. Absurdly, he is now in a better position than his fellow detainees who haven’t been convicted of war crimes.

If this is the punishment that a military tribunal thinks fit for a man who helped bin Laden kill Americans, than McCarthy has seen enough: The experiment has failed. "I still think that the best system would be one that combines the demonstrated strengths of the civilian courts with the military system’s potential of protecting intelligence. Congress should get busy crafting such a system." (More Salim Ahmed Hamdan stories.)