Hamdan To Be Transferred To Yemen

This should be interesting. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's one time driver, and catalyst for multiple lawsuits that found their way to the US Supreme Court and helped shape the legal landscape for dealing with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, is getting sent to Yemen to serve out the remainder of his sentence.

Once considered a dangerous terrorist by the Bush administration, Mr. Hamdan was convicted only on lesser charges in August and given what amounted to a four-month sentence by a military jury. At that time, a military judge gave Mr. Hamdan credit for at least the 61 months he was held after being charged, reducing his sentence to a matter of months. The verdict was a sharp setback for Pentagon officials, who had contended they could detain him indefinitely.

“The Yemeni government is very pleased by the announcement to transfer the Yemeni detainee Saleh Ahmed bin Hamdan,” said Mohammed al Basha, a spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington. “We hope that this will be a positive first step to the transfer of the remaining detainees.”

The decision avoids what could have been a difficult issue for President-elect Barack Obama, who has said he wants to close the United States military prison in Cuba.

Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers were preparing to fight the Pentagon’s assertion that he could be detained indefinitely, and Mr. Hamdan’s case could have been brought before the Supreme Court — for a second time.

Instead, Mr. Hamdan, who is about 40, will be held in a prison in Sana, the Yemeni capital, until Dec. 27 and then released to his wife and children under supervision, Mr. al Basha said.

I fully expect him to be lost by the Yemeni authorities, who have had serious problems holding on to al Qaeda thugs, and we'll be hearing more about Hamdan in the years to come. Hopefully, it wont be because he's carried out a mass casualty attack somewhere, but because he was taken out in airstrikes before such an attack occurs.

I guess we'll get a real-world test as to whether he was really just a hack driver who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or pulled the wool over the left's eyes and was really more involved in al Qaeda operations than he or his supporters ever let on.