GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - A military jury imposed a surprisingly lenient sentence of 5 1/2 years on Osama bin Laden's driver yesterday for a war crime that could have brought him a life term.
The sentence - all but about four months of which has been served by Salim Hamdan - appeared to be a rebuke by the six senior military officers who made up the jury of the Bush administration's tribunal for trying terror suspects.
Sleep-derivation was used in interrogations after ban, documents show. A4.
Justice Department lawyer John Murphy had urged the jurors to send the Yemeni to prison for 30 years to life after his conviction Wednesday for providing material support to terrorism. Hamdan was a driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda.
"Take one second to think of the victims of Mr. Hamdan's support of terrorism," Murphy said in a closing argument that cast Hamdan as a committed extremist and included graphic images of terrorist attacks. "Your sentence will be their justice. Your work is our justice, and you shouldn't flinch from it."
The defense had argued for no more than 45 months.
Defense lawyer Charlie Swift, the retired Navy officer who was assigned to represent Hamdan five years ago and took his challenge of the tribunal to the US Supreme Court and won, asked the jurors to keep in mind that American justice is based on law, not vengeance.
"One of the things that makes us unique is we don't sentence based on passion; we sentence based on law," Swift said in his closing argument in the sentencing phase of the trial........
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