We all understand, having been told so often by President Bush and his sycophants surrogates, why the Guantanamo Bay torture center detention facility was necessary: to protect us from the evil doers! And we’ve constantly been told that regular trials of these “evil doers” in a real court room where rules of evidence apply, instead of in front of a “military tribunal” (where most of them don’t) would weaken our national security and endanger lives because those stupid liberal activist judges in the federal judiciary system might let some of these evil doers off the hook because the evidence against them might technically have been obtained in a manner those judges wouldn’t consider proper.

So, now that we are having one of our first big military trials of an Al Qaeda bad guy, Salim Hamdan, the alleged mastermind of Osama Bin Ladin’s motor pool, why do we find out for the first time that one of the really bad evil doers had been given Get Out of Gitmo Free card without any trial or tribunal ever having been held?

Soon after Osama bin Laden’s driver [Hamden] got here in 2002, he told interrogators the identity of the al Qaeda chief’s most senior bodyguard — then a fellow prison camp detainee.

But, inexplicably, the U.S. let the bodyguard go. […]

Michael St. Ours, an agent with the Naval Criminal Intelligence Service, NCIS, provided the first tidbit. He testified for the prosecution that his job as a prison camps interrogator in May 2002 was to find and focus on the bodyguards among the detainees.

And Hamdan helped identify 30 of them — 10 percent of the roughly 300 detainees then held here. They had just been transferred to Camp Delta from the crude compound called Camp X-Ray, and U.S. intelligence was still trying to unmask them.

Chief among them was Casablanca-born Abdallah Tabarak, then 47, described by St. Ours as “a hard individual,” and, thanks to Hamdan, “the head bodyguard of all the bodyguards.”

St. Ours said he was eager to speak with Tabarak. But the Moroccan was “uncooperative,” and St. Ours moved on to other intelligence jobs — and never learned afterward what became of him.

Then, on cross-examination, Hamdan defense attorney Harry Schneider dropped a bombshell:

“Would it surprise you to learn he was released without ever being charged?” St. Ours looked stunned.

“Yeah,” he said.

Well, what does a NCIS agent know about who’s really an evil doer ready to kill us all in our sleep (like Mr. Salim “I’ll help you identify Al Qaeda members” Hamden) and someone who isn’t? I’m sure the Bush administration and the Pentagon had very good reasons for releasing Mr. Abdallah “You can’t make me talk” Tabarak back to his home country of Morocco, rather than prosecute him as a terrorist. Right? Well, we don’t know because they aren’t willing to talk about it yet:

Prison camp and Pentagon spokesmen did not reply Thursday to a request for an explanation. Tabarak’s name was gone from an official prison camp roster drawn up by the Defense Department in September 2004, after some 200 captives had been sent away. A month before, Morocco’s state news agency said all five of its nationals had been repatriated from the camps, for investigation.

Well, at least we are going to make Osama’s driver pay for his crime of being a low level minion for Al Qaeda, even if we did let his chief bodyguard skate. And that’s the important thing. Because as we’ve learned from Tom Friedman, as long as some Muslim in the world pays for the crimes of another, that’s all that really matters.