Home | World and National News
Home
| World and National News
On video, bin Laden driver says he worked for charity
By Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy Newspapers
Jul 24, 2008
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Pentagon prosecutors yesterday screened a 2001 video of Osama bin Laden's driver lying and being evasive in his first battlefield interrogation, in a bid to prove he was an al-Qaeda terrorist. In the video, recorded in Afghanistan, Salim Hamdan never mentions the al-Qaeda leader. Instead, he says he worked for a charity called Wafa, alternately as an administrator, purchasing agent or well digger. Wafa is Arabic for devotion.
Moreover, Hamdan - the defendant in the first Guantanamo war-crimes trial - confirms a key element of the government's case against him on charges of conspiracy and material support for terror. He admits, on the grainy tape, that surface-to-air missiles were in his car when he was captured. But he says a friend named Abu Yasser lent him the car, which came with the weapons.
"The car owner told me they were there," Hamdan said on the video. "But I don't know how to use them in the first place."
At the start of yesterday's screening, Hamdan walked out in a huff, excused by the Navy judge and accompanied by guards. He later returned, and apologized. He blamed unspecified differences with the attorney who has represented him the longest, retired Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Swift.
The video offered an extraordinary look inside the battlefield in the earliest days of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which aimed to topple the Taliban and hunt down bin Laden in reprisal for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hamdan, captured in November 2001, is shown sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of a nondescript room, flexicuffs on his hands, while answering Arabic questions from an interrogator with an apparent American accent, who is out of the picture. A U.S. Special Forces soldier stands guard behind him, holding an assault rifle, his face masked.
As portrayed by the prosecutor in his opening statement Monday, Hamdan, a Yemeni, offers nothing that appears valuable to his captors, who are preparing to assault the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.
Hamdan's defense lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, has said he believes that his client was the first Arab captured in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan - and the video is the first recorded interrogation.
It capped the third day of Hamdan's trial before a six-officer military jury, and was in stark juxtaposition to testimony yesterday from former FBI agent Ali Soufan, once among the U.S. government's top al-Qaeda experts.
Soufan described Hamdan as "a valuable source" during an interrogation in the summer of 2002, a month after his transfer to the detention center at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.
Hamdan identified al-Qaeda members from various displays of photos, Soufan said, and linked some of them to a series of attacks on U.S. targets, based on conversations he overheard while driving bin Laden.
The agent also quoted from conversations inside al-Qaeda, which the driver said during interrogations that he had overheard from the front seat of his Toyota pickup while shuttling bin Laden around Afghanistan.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Soufan, "bin Laden was happy about the results. He heard bin Laden say he didn't expect the operation to be that successful. He only thought 1,000 to 1,500 would perish." The Pentagon puts the Sept. 11 death toll at 2,973.
Soufan did not indicate that Hamdan knew the details of the attacks beforehand.
Copyright 2008
Powered By Zebra Mobile