Suppose that, in some sort of spy novel phantasm, Mr. Hamdan had turned up at any NATO embassy, in Kabul or Islamabad, on September 10th of 2001, and identified himself as the driver of a shady character, insisted to see the Ambassador or the local CIA officer or some other official, offered to cross over and “spill the beans” for the good of the world. Let us further assume that a simple driver would have been allowed past the gates and security fences and granted an audience, and that he would have been given the opportunity to tell what he knew, as the advertised consigliore of the al-Qaeda Don and the evil character of a James Bond story, with all precise details and drawings and places and names and flight numbers etc.....”Mr. Ambassador, my evil boss is going to use four airplanes as missiles tomorrow morning and trigger the War on Terror! You must drop everything and save humanity, NOW, IMMEDIATELY!”. Is this the spirit of charges against Mr. Hamdan-- that he failed this post-script scenario?

Although this hypothesis is with the benefit of hindsight, it is still fair to say that Mr. Hamdan would have not been taken seriously, if even granted the opportunity to be heard. That’s with a great presumption that Mr. Hamdan had the knowledge to find and reach to the right places and persons. Again, who knows? Was Mr. Hamdan really part of the inner circle and a master craftsman of a ruse (by violent, and admittedly very innovative means) to challenge America and its western allies in a significant ideological battle? Or could Mr. Hamdan even locate New York or Washington on a world map? Is it fair to say that he was just a “yes man” to his “leader” -one of the boss-pleasing types who also serve as planners and ministers in western capitals-- where the bosses are preoccupied with fighting the previous war, and where the yes men come up with innovative “legal” findings that fly in the face of their own constitutions and legal standards-- Guantanamo, torture, military tribunals, arrest of foreigners on foreign soil by other foreigners, and “criminal” charges of being a driver and an enemy combatant!? In words of the Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, was Mr. Hamdan a “known unknown” or an “unknown unknown”? Or was he simply a clueless nobody caught up in a criminal gang, and some six years later is serving as a leisurely convenience to other, equally clueless, people?

From a distance, the military tribunal appears to be a festival of juvenilia crafted by “yes men”. They have waterboarded the system and earned criticism of their own country on fluid standards of law, gossip evidence, torture, secret trials and the real meaning of justice in a trial-and-error experiment with precious little in tangible results. After seven years, the color-coded terror alert has not gone lower than the middle “yellow” level and perhaps this can best serve as a measure of progress on the “yes men” scale. Sadly, the focus on roots of violence and terrorism has given way to a revengeful chase of a single terrorist and his cooks, cleaners, mule riders and the electrician that fixed his door bell a decade ago. Have the “yes men” simply made an elaborate copy of the failed “war on drugs”—which was hyped with the occupation of Panama and the arrest of Noriega, but has noticeably failed in all other fronts?

In turn, and conversely, I tend to ponder whether this is a self-believed war, where anger and a desire for a fight led war to take over the need for cool-headed investigation of past crimes and prevention of future ones. Al-Qaeda’s collective aim might well have been to draw the world’s most forceful military, scientific and economic power into a confusing, self-made and expensive quandary. The target to the bait and the ruse was confused with an invitation to an old fashion, albeit asymmetric, war. Warriors busy with the enigma of the previous war(s) lost their nerve and chose the wrong solution. The elusive war on terror, now longer that World War II, and its battlegrounds and the enemy is murky. But who invented this corrosive boomerang? Again, who really knows?