Salim Ahmed Hamdan was found guilty of providing material support for terrorism at a Guantánamo military commission today. Hamdan's guilt was never in doubt, but it is rather surprising that the prosecution was unable to persuade a simple majority of the military jurors that Hamdan participated in a conspiracy to murder American soldiers, for which he was also charged. That failure underscores the fact that we learned more during this trial about the feebleness and bankruptcy of the Bush administration's fight against terrorism than we did about Salim Ahmed Hamdan or al-Qaida.

Hamdan was Osama bin Laden's driver, a fact he never denied. It would have been an open and shut case of material support for terrorism in federal court. If the Bush administration had chosen that path, Hamdan would have been safely locked away years ago. But no, the Bush administration chose to create a system of military commissions to pursue war crimes charges against suspected al-Qaida terrorists, because they were highly valued intelligence assets and the procedures of regular criminal trials were too restrictive to make a case against these battlefield detainees. After nearly seven years, we have the first example of results, and it's not good.

Osama bin Laden's driver is clearly a highly-prized intelligence asset who likely possessed invaluable information about the movements and perhaps even the whereabouts of bin Laden and other senior al-Qaida figures. This is exactly the situation envisioned when the military commission system was created. No lawyers would get in the way of interrogations. No deals would be sought to provide information in exchange for leniency.

So what happened? During his interrogation, Hamdan made a serious offer of assistance, and the government didn't do anything about it. We don't know precisely what this offer entailed because that portion of the government's case was presented to the jury in secret. But we do know that Hamdan's attorney reminded the jurors of the offer and the government's subsequent inaction during his closing argument. It seems likely that this was a very serious offer, probably to help to track down Hamdan's former boss, if the defence wanted to remind the jurors about something in the prosecution's case. The whole point of keeping people like Hamdan out of the criminal system was to gather intelligence like this. Yet when presented with an offer of assistance from Osama bin Laden's former driver, they botched it.

The more permissive rules and procedures for the commissions is what has caused numerous courts to rule the commissions unlawful. No US court has yet to determine whether this latest iteration meets the standards of American law, meaning that Hamdan's and any other convictions in the commissions could be invalidated some time in the future.

These new rules have also created the perverse situation of putting US judges in the position of having to decide how much torture it too much. The judge in Hamdan's case ruled that some of Hamdan's statements were inadmissible because they were made in "highly coercive" conditions, but others were allowed because they were merely "coercive".

So now that we have wound our way through various euphemisms to find an acceptable level of torture, what was the result in the trial? Hamdan was acquitted of the charge to which these coerced statements pertained. So we went through this whole exercise for nothing.

The worst aspect of this entire process is that the Bush administration has simultaneously devalued the concept of a war crime and elevated al-Qaida terrorists to the status of warriors. Charles Taylor is a war criminal. Radovan Karadzic is a war criminal. Salim Hamdan is a chauffeur. He is clearly guilty of the crime of material support for terrorism. But now he is a warrior, legitimising al-Qaida terrorists' belief that they are waging a holy war against the United States and our allies.

The Bush administration turned an open and shut case into a seven-year odyssey that undermines the entire rationale for bypassing the criminal justice system in the first place. Well done.