Salim Hamdan was one of the cases in which bounty hunters handed potential terror associates over to U.S forces in Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks. He was transferred to the detention facility in Guantanamo, on the grounds that there was a “reason to believe that Hamdan was a member of al-Qaeda or was otherwise involved in terrorism directed against the United States.” He was later allegedly found to have served as Osama Bin Laden’s driver and body guard with no evidence of his involvement in Bin Landen’s terrorist “umbrella group.” In 2004, he was charged with conspiracy to commit “the following offenses triable by military commission: attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, murder by an unprivileged belligerent and…show more content… 8, of the U.S Constitution that specified the power of Congress, Congress would have had constitutional authority to define conspiracy as a war crime, however due to the incorporation of the law of war into the UMCJ, no treaty in the law of war specifies a rule over the offence of conspiracy and therefore, it could not be used as basis for prosecution. Following the findings that the military commission deemed illegal under the UMCJ, the focus was then moved to the understanding of whether Hamdan’s trial would also violate the Geneva Conventions, in which the court came to the decision that “Common Article 3 is applicable here and requires that Hamdan be tried by a “regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.” This was a puzzling decision by the court since Common Article 3 of the Convention refers to “cases of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the high contracting parties.” The Justice department found that Hamdan’s case was part of an international conflict and thus not applicable under the Article 3 of the Geneva convention, moreover the case could not fit into article 2 since al-Qaeda is not a state and can never become a high contacting party to the Geneva
