Mustafa Qadri

A military jury’s verdict on Wednesday in the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II — that Yemeni Guantanamo prisoner Salim Hamdan is guilty of material support for terrorism, but not guilty of terrorism itself — was the culmination of two weeks of proceedings that provided some extraordinary insights into the United States’ so-called “War on Terror.” And yet, as Jonathan Mahler recently wrote in the New York Times, the lofty ideals of the Nuremberg Trials, which opened with Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson declaring, “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason,” were not in evidence during the Hamdan trial. Nor have they been manifested in the verdict.