This Is Going To Sting
The prosecution was looking for a sentence of 30 years to life, and the tribunal gave Hamdan 6 months plus time served.
From CNN: Bin Laden driver sentenced to 5 ½ years
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (CNN) — Osama bin Laden’s former driver was sentenced to 66 months in prison Thursday after his conviction on charges of providing material support to al Qaeda.
Salim Hamdan, who has been imprisoned at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, has been credited with five years served.
At this point his lawyers may not appeal, because he only has 6 months left and will probably finish the sentence before an appeal will be heard. The problem is what happens to him after the end of the sentence – will he be released, and if he is, where will he be released to?
23 comments
Thought you might like to know…there’s another beef recall…
http://www.ethicurean.com/2008/08/06/beef-recall-2/
Well, I wouldn’t mind having a driver. He seems to be pretty loyal. And I’d be a better boss than his old boss, since I don’t get involved in that criminal stuff.
Do you think he knows evasive driving techniques? That’d be pretty cool.
anything that makes the bush administration look like fools (tho they do that nicely themselves)
All that effort by prosecutors… all that deliberate undermining of due process and destruction of centuries of fundamental judicial principles… and what have they got to chauffeur it?
I was going to do the “barfing Boy Scouts” as soon as I got a break, Jill.
DCap, do you remember the ending of the Leon Uris novel QB VII, the Hedgemony got half a year instead of a ha’penny.
Steve, it’s time for them to cut a deal with Osama’s barber, and take a flyer with his travel agent, before they poke their other eye out playing with “al Qaeda #2s”.
Josh, welcome. First-timers get caught in the moderation queue.
I doubt he knows evasive driving per se, but dodging the bomb craters in the non-roads in Afghanistan and Pakistan would probably qualify him for driving in most large cities with potholes.
I was just listening to this on ABC Radio here. They said that the Jury wasn’t buying any of the prosecutions terrorist garbage and that even though the case had been rigged, nobody was buying it. The reporter said that the Judge and prosecution were looking very *uncomfortable*. LOL
There was a lot more… but I was just laughing. LOL
And this was their best case? LOL I can’t wait for all those civil suits to start flowing after Nov! (Including for the Dems, assuming they win, which is not a sure thing by any stretch, since the Dems have proven they have no balls and will probably keep all the inmates in Gitmo and other places around the World).
PS. Sorry I’ve been AWOL… 😉 “Real Life”(tm) intervenes! 😉 Been busy setting up the two PC’s and installing and configing myriads of software! Fun… Aha. 😉
Cheers (and I hope all is well with everyone!) 🙂
I assumed you were busy. There have been people from Malta stopping by to look at your Gran’s recipes.
It’s absurd, and everyone knows it. The jury decided not to totally embarrass the prosecution, but it’s fairly obvious they didn’t buy any of it and they were field grade officers [major to colonel] of all services.
Well, at least you have something working, so that’s a start.
LOL That’s kinda funny! 😀 (About the recipes.) My Grandmother would be pleased though. 🙂
Bah! Windoze! I hope someone blows up Gates new penthouse in Beijing!
I had to reinstall sevral times to get it right, most of the time, it refused to recognise the new HDD! Even Vista, not just XP (which I expected to have trouble with). Linux, on the other hand, was up and running in less than half an hour and is still sweet. It took days to get XP & Vista Ultimate x64 installed and working! Anyone who wants XP or Vista on new hardware is an idiot.
/rant
😉 I feel better, thanks. LOL
I’m going to give Sun’s xVM VirtualBox v1.6 a go. I bet it runs XP under Linux better than native XP! LOL I have a license for VMware 6… but that’s getting too resource hungry, and xVM is Open Source. 🙂
And yeah, It certainly is absurd! It’s a complete farce, and the *Sane People*(tm) have known it all along. It’s only the idiots and crackpots that think the Bushmorons have done anything to decrease Terrorism.
So… you want some more recipe’s to help increase traffic? 😉 :b
Heh… Cheers! 😀
I can store them here until you get a site up. They will be in the recipe category, so by selecting that category you can grab them all at once when you’re ready to open shop.
There a lot of mid-level people in the military who are really angry about what is going on, and the Air Force is in a lot of trouble because of a failure of leadership at the top.
The recently reported leak of reactor water on a nuclear submarine would have been unimaginable a decade ago, so it’s not just the Air Force. The Army and Marines are tired. The military is not fairing at all well under Republican misrule. We may have to go back to a draft to straighten things out, because the all volunteer force is severely bent, if not broken.
Well that was worth it I don’t think….
I heard about that reactor leak. I was surprised. I spent part of my time at GD at a Naval yard and had a lot of admiration and respect for the Navy’s technical and managerial excellence. I used to comment that the US Space program should have been run by the Navy rather than NASA who were running it into the ground. Now, I’m not so sure. Sad. A friend of a friend recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan. My friend said that the vet commented that the US troops are doing it hard and the Aussies had to give them supplies and technical help because of equipment failure and poor logistical support. Great way to win a war. I am sure a lot of vet’s will resign after their tours rather than reup.
The recipe’s were a gift. 🙂 I just haven’t had time to dig out any more.
I have XAMPP running and NetBeans. I have licenses for the ActiveState IDE and DevKit tools also (Komodo, Perl, Python, TCL). First thing I need to do is migrate some old Perl scripts into PHP and/or Python. I haven’t cut code for a long time, but I used to enjoy it quite a lot. I spent more time white-collar managing the past decade rather than having fun doing any actual work. 😉 LOL I still remember the old Z80 machine code/assembler mnemonics! LOL Heck… I think I still have a couple Zilog Z80 (and maybe a Z80000) CPU’s. Wonder if they still work? Even in antistat packaging, they don’t last forever. I think Zilog still make them, mainly for the Military. 🙂 I have a couple Inmos T800 Transputer chips and 32×32 switch chip also, left over from a project I managed.
Ahhhh… The good ol’ days(tm) 😉
It was millions of tax dollars we won’t see again, Jams.
Kryten, Rumsfeld’s outsourcing and force transformation have eliminated many of the technical skills that the military once possessed on its own and replaced them with “contractors”, who might be able to hack it in garrisons, but aren’t worth anything in a war zone. A hardware tech guy doesn’t apply for a job thinking he might get shot at, so you end up with people who don’t mind getting shot at, but might not know which end a soldering iron to grab. “Just In Time” inventory control barely works in the US, and it damn sure doesn’t work when supply trucks and the roads they use are subject to being blown up.
There are a lot of guys trying to get out, but being held over. Only general officers seem to be able to schedule their retirements.
It not just the military, there are Z-80s in a lot of appliances functioning as controllers.
It’s tough to go back to thinking in single lines of code after a lay off. I’m doing some conversions and am having to remember what commands do and there parameters are in a couple of different languages. It’s almost as annoying as moving between a “Big Endian” machine and a “Small Endian” or switching to Reverse Polish Notation on a calculator.
i love my hp calculator!
My Dad always used HPs, I just preferred the TIs, but I received special deals on TIs.
LOL yeah! 😀 I still have my ancient TI-59 calc (with some still working mag strips, though most died after years of use) that I got when I started Uni! Cost a month’s pay too, even with student discount. I even had the printer, though that died long ago. 🙂 I always used HP financial calc’s though. 🙂 I had no problem with RPN, I programmed in Forth and other RPN languages for a while. 😉
I recently discovered that the TI-59 still has a website!
TI-59 Home Page
Some things just work… at least, things designed in the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s did anyway. 😉
In a box somewhere I should still have my Kurta “pepper grinder” as well as a couple of slide rules. They should still work.
I do appreciate my last TI because it’s powered by a solar cell, no worries about batteries dying in an exam.
There’s nothing wrong with any of the systems, it’s just the hassle of remembering who uses what.
It’s sad today. When I was an Engineering student, we were encouraged to use calculators, especially scientific or programmable calc’s, but they were forbidden during exam’s! You had to pass by proving you had the required knowledge and comprehension, and knew how to apply it. I was helping an engineering student with a paper last year, and his calc died, and he was completely lost. Had to look up formula’s with google! I could remember most formula’s, even though I haven’t had to use them for many years, because I had a solid foundation to rely on. No wonder nothing lasts these days, and it’s almost all designed by computer now. Even the course texts these days are laughable. *sigh*
I still have my trusty old slide rule too! And know how to use it. I used it to solve trig equations mostly. 🙂 It’s a good German one an Uncle gave me when I was accepted into Engineering school that will last forever… Faber-Castell I think… 🙂
You know what the most common thing I was told (with some arm twisting for an honest response that is) when I went for a job interview during the last 5 years was? “I can’t hire you. You’d have my job in 6 Months” (or some variation of that) by the *Exec’s* 10+ years my junior. My resume scares people. That’s why I’m doing my own thing now, once again. And the only thing they care about is “What have you achieved recently?” These Exec’s are morons, and they don’t understand what my resume is telling them. Comprehension is a lost art I fear, along with common sense.
/rant 😉
They don’t teach the basics anymore. Graduates know how to use tools, but they don’t know how to create them. I was asked if I knew how to use a 4GL, and when I said I could write one, the interviewer didn’t understand what I meant.
I gave up in the middle of one interview because the person was asking questions from a form and didn’t know enough about the job to understand that my resume answered all of the questions. I told her flat out that if a technology company didn’t have an interviewer who knew something about their own technology, it obviously wasn’t a place I wanted to work.
A guy I knew wanted to hire me for his project at this company, but I wasn’t going to deal with the management. He told me to put his name on the resume, but they obviously hadn’t read the resume they required me to submit.
Yeah, I’ve been hearing “You are over qualified for the position” for years, and I still don’t understand why that’s a negative.
Reminds me of an old project management rule I was told when i first started… “If you don’t deal with the corporate culture, it will deal with you!” This is why many projects (especially longer projects) fail.
I was watching the opening ceremony in Beijing last night. It was all the pundits said it would be and more. The USA, if it has any intelligence left at all, should be scared to death. The Chinese had so many subtle (and not so subtle) messages throughout the ceremony, it’s taken me an entire day to digest and consider most of it. Little things like the fact that the crowd (mostly Chinese) cheered the loadest for Iraq, Australia and China, and were subdued for the USA and others. The fact that China had over 30k military police patrolling the streets of Beijing (along with a huge Police force) and had thousands of undercover agents amongst the people watching the ceremony. The technical ability they showed during the ceremony was simply stunning. And they did it all in 5 years or less!! As an Engineer, I am in awe. As an ex-intel op… I am concerned. And the themes of the ceremony were for the most part counter to everything the USA currently stands for (I mean of course the World view of the Bush administration’s track record). I wonder if anyone in Bushworld will realize they were just given a huge slap and a warning? I doubt it. If I had to sum up that ceremony… I would call it China’s *Coming Out* party! I think they just served notice.
Time, as always, will tell. 🙂
another ‘you made me google’. i’d never heard of them.
i could probably still use a slide rule if you held a gun to my head. maybe.
not sure why rpn made more sense to me than the ‘normal’ way, but it does. much easier, even though i learned it only after using ti calculators for several years.
I was asked if I knew how to use a 4GL, and when I said I could write one, the interviewer didn’t understand what I meant.
🙂 i doubt i could write one, but i’ve used a few of them, and at least i understand what you’re talking about. gee, does this qualify me to get a job interviewing job candidates?
Kryten, I just wanted to code, I was and am sick of the management side. Give me the specs and leave me alone to turn them into the product. That’s what they guy trying to hire me was looking for, knowing full well I didn’t want, and wouldn’t accept his job.
There Hedgemony wouldn’t understand if they had handed the Shrubbery a clear statement of intent written in English with no words longer than two syllables. They think everyone is supposed to do things their way, and won’t accept that others have different goals. They can’t conceive of the reality that the Chinese don’t need the US for anything other than a market, and the US has no influence over them other than that.
I was sure it was a “K”, Hipparchia, but I haven’t used it years. It was very popular for rallying [timed racing on a road course].
Some people like RPN and find it a lot easier to use, it is easier to implement in some hardware environments.
It would make more sense to have someone who works in the field interview technical applicants, than personnel people who are only trained in bureaucracy.