From Salon
By Jennifer Daskal

“Everyone tells me the law. But where is the law?” asked Salim Hamdan, in a courtroom here on Monday morning. Hamdan was dressed in his khaki prison garb, his forehead wrinkled and eyes dulled, his shoulders hunched. The 37-year-old detainee’s military commissions case once made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which delivered a powerful rebuke to the Bush administration in Hamdan’s favor. But you wouldn’t have known it now, nearly two years later.

By Tuesday afternoon, Hamdan had reached the conclusion that there was no law in Guantánamo. Or at least no law that could justify his continued presence at his trial.

The military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, tried to convince him otherwise. “You should have great faith in the law,” the judge urged. After all, it was Hamdan’s previous court challenge that led the Supreme Court in June 2006 to strike down the first round of military commissions as unlawful. “You won. Your name is all over the law books,” the judge said.

But the victory was short-lived. Four months later, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, authorizing another system of commissions to begin — and the government charged Hamdan once again.

“You even won the very first time you came before me,” Allred added.

And that too was true. When Hamdan first appeared before Allred in June 2007 — in his second round with the military commissions — the judge concluded that he did not have jurisdiction over Hamdan and dismissed the case. Whereas the military commissions’ authority is limited to cases brought against “unlawful enemy combatants,” Hamdan had been determined to be an “enemy combatant” — a term that encompasses both lawful and unlawful statuses.

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