For attorney Joe McMillan, one moment stood out in the trial of Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Hamdan.

It was late in the trial when Hamdan, imprisoned in Guantanamo for the previous six years, stood and thanked the military jurors for their service and apologized for any harm he may have caused through his work as a driver for Osama bin Laden.

“Even in the face of that ordeal, to be able to express his thanks said a lot about who he is,” said McMillan, a Bainbridge resident and one of four attorneys to represent Hamdan, the first Guantanamo detainee to be tried for war crimes.

In August, Hamdan was convicted of material support of terrorism, and sentenced to five and a half years in prison, a far cry from the conspiracy conviction and life sentence sought by prosecutors.

The ruling closed one chapter in a long legal battle for McMillan and colleagues at Perkins Coie law firm, which volunteered their services to aid Hamdan’s defense. Over the last four years, McMillan has logged thousands of hours on the case and made eight trips to Guantanamo, seeking broader rights for Hamdan and future detainee defendants.

“For this year, 2008, it’s been pretty all-consuming up to this point,” McMillan said.

Hamdan unknowingly began down a path to Guantanamo in 1996.

He had left an impoverished life in Yemen, searching for work in the jihadist movement.

Through friends he landed a job driving agricultural trucks on the estate of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Occasionally he drove bin Laden himself.

In the time Hamdan worked for the al-Qaeda leader, the group carried out an attack on the USS Cole, U.S. embassies in Africa, and finally, the World Trade Center in 2001.

As McMillan describes it, Hamdan came to fear bin Laden, and though aware of the attacks, he was trapped between feeding his family and abetting a terrorist organization.

“He put it aptly, I think, as being caught up ‘between two fires,’” McMillan said.

Prosecutors would later argue that Hamdan had actively supported the acts of terror.

In the invasion of Afghanistan that followed 9/11, rebels captured Hamdan as he attempted to flee the country and sold him to U.S. troops for a bounty.

Hamdan’s association with bin Laden landed him in detention at Guantanamo Bay in 2002, where he was held as an enemy combatant.

In 2004 he was charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism under a military commission convened by the Bush administration, becoming one of only two detainees to be formerly charged with a crime.

A Navy attorney named Charles Swift, who has since retired from the military, filed a writ of habeas corpus on Hamdan’s behalf, demanding the government declare its case against Hamdan.

When the motion was refused, Swift sued the government.

It was then that McMillan and Perkins Coie joined the legal fray. The firm was well positioned to secure the case a hearing in the U.S. 9th Circuit, which had not yet ruled on habeas corpus rights for detainees.

McMillan said that when Seattle colleague Harry Schneider received a call about joining the case they jumped at the opportunity, and within days the firm had assembled a pro bono legal team.

The case hardly fell into line with McMillan’s usual work as an attorney specializing in intellectual property and commercial litigation. But he and fellow attorneys dove into the task of researching and applying constitutional, military and international code.

With Swift, they launched an attack on the military commission, calling into question the president’s authority to establish it, as well as its legality under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Convention. The case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld eventually was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, where in 2006 justices handed down a ruling that rendered the commission unconstitutional.

However, the victory for Hamdan’s defense team was brief.

Soon after the Supreme Court decision, Congress passed a Military Commissions Act, which created a restructured tribunal.

The federal government brought new charges against Hamdan in 2007, adding counts of material support of terrorism to the charge of conspiracy.

McMillan and his colleagues stayed busy in the months leading up to the trial, filing nine pretrial motions challenging the legality of various aspects of the commission.

Unlike the original tribunal, Hamdan would be allowed to attend his trial under the new commission. But McMillan said the new system admitted hearsay as evidence, meaning Hamdan would not have the right to confront his accusers. And while the commission would not hear testimony extracted through torture, it would admit testimony “coerced” from a suspect.

Knowing Hamdan had been held for long periods in solitary confinement and was subjected to frequent sleep deprivation during interrogations, McMillan said the distinction was murky.

“What was actually the difference between torture and coercion is unclear,” he said.

McMillan flew to Guantanamo on July 11 to begin pretrial motions. The base, he said, is most striking in its insularity, with its own restaurants, stores and housing. No traffic passes beyond the “wire” to Cuba, and goods are shipped in by air or boat.

The Hamdan hearings began with the military judge steadily rejecting each of defense’s pretrial motions.

After the jury of military officers was seated, the prosecution spent a week and a half presenting its case, relying heavily on statements drawn from Hamdan, to paint the driver as an al-Qaeda accomplice.

In four ensuing days, McMillan and fellow attorneys worked to reinforce Hamdan’s argument that he had known of the attacks but not taken part in their planning or execution.

In the end, the jury appeared to reject the notion of Hamdan as a terrorist agent, finding him guilty of the lesser count for rendering services to bin Laden.

“They recognized that (Hamdan) was not ideologically connected to terrorism,” McMillan said. “He was a driver working to support his family.”

The judge seemed swayed by the defense as well, ignoring the prosecution’s calls for a 30-year sentence, and doling out 66 months instead. With more than five years of detainment already served, the sentence gives Hamdan less than five more months in prison. In what McMillan said was another poignant moment in the trial, the judge told Hamdan he hoped he would soon be returned to his family in Yemen.

It remains to be seen how soon that day will come. The government has the power to hold Hamdan as an enemy combatant until the end of the war, in this case the war on terror.

McMillan said he is optimistic that Hamdan will be released, and believes that by locking him back up in Guantanamo the government would discredit the ruling of its own military commission.

McMillan will continue to represent Hamdan, though he has time now to focus on his regular duties. What he has taken away from challenge, he said, is a sense of duty to extend constitutional and international protections, even to perceived enemies in a time of war.

“We need to provide our criminal defendants with all the rights and protections that the law affords,” McMillan said. “It’s our tradition, and it says as much as anything about who we are, the way we carry out these trials.”