No ordinary driver, no ordinary cargo

EDWARD HORGAN (Letters, August 8) is either naive or disingenuous in complaining about the sentencing of Salim Hamdan by a US military court, claiming he was “sentenced for providing material aid for terrorism” for “simply earning a living working as a driver for a foreign national in a foreign country”.

Osama bin Laden, for whom Salim Hamdan worked as both a driver and bodyguard, was no ordinary foreign national.

According to a July 24 Time magazine report on Salim Hamdan, he was captured driving a vehicle which had two surface-to-air missiles in the boot. If this combination of circumstance does not constitute the provision of “material aid for terrorism” in Mr Horgan’s eyes, I fail to see what would in fact constitute such provision. The possession of a nuclear device on Pennsylvania Avenue perhaps?

Mr Horgan neglects to mention that Mr Hamdan will be released within a year with time served being part of his sentence.

Mr Horgan then goes on to decry the “one million dead” in “unlawful wars” which, presumably, is a reference to the Iraq war. The fact is no one knows how many have been killed in Iraq as a result of US action.

Many of the numbers bandied about are wild estimates. According to the Iraq Body Count project, the total number of violent deaths to have occurred there since 2003 is less than 90,000.

All deaths are to be regretted, of course, but the US is hardly responsible for all of them.

The US does not as a matter of policy target civilians, whereas the enemy does.

Whether the war is unlawful or not is a far more difficult question than Mr Horgan would have us believe. The US administration considered it has every legal justification to go to war under a list of UN resolutions stemming from the continual failure of Saddam Hussein to observe the terms of the ceasefire from the first Gulf War.

James McGrath

Birchgrove

Hollyford

Co Tipperary