Would a federal court have convicted Hamdan?
Well, I don’t know … It’s hard to know whether the administration would have been able to get enough evidence admitted into court to prosecute him in federal court, given that in these tribunals, many statements Hamdan had made were not admitted. So it’s hard to know. How will the decision impact the trials of the high-value detainees? Hamdan was chosen as the very first case in part because the prosecution felt he was going to be a clean case, that there weren’t going to be issues of torture and that he was a cooperative detainee. And yet, the judge had to bar statements he made. Well, what’s going to happen when the defendant is a more senior figure and wasn’t cooperative? It’s probably safe to assume he was treated more roughly, maybe rendered to a foreign country for a while. So I think the message is the government is going to have its work cut out for it with the high-value detainees. You mentioned Nuremberg earlier, and both the prosecution and the defense talk about Nuremberg a
