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Bin Laden's driver confessed, FBI says

A Guantanamo prisoner admitted working as Osama bin Laden's driver and helping the al-Qaeda leader evade capture after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, US federal agents testified, countering defense assertions that the detainee was a minor employee with no role in terrorism.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan told interrogators he chauffeured bin Laden around Afghanistan for years and shuttled him between different locations after Sept. 11 to avoid US retaliation, agents from the FBI and Department of Defense told a court on Thursday at this military outpost in southeastern Cuba.

At one point, Hamdan recalled overhearing bin Laden say he expected no more than 1,500 people would be killed in the attacks, FBI Special Agent George Crouch said.

"When Osama bin Laden learned it was much larger than that he was very pleased," Crouch recalled Hamdan telling him and two other FBI agents during interrogation sessions in the summer of 2002.

The testimony came in a pretrial hearing to determine whether Hamdan can be prosecuted before the first US military tribunals since the World War II era.

The two-day hearing ended late on Thursday with the judge saying he would issue a written ruling later after he returns to his office in Washington.

Hamdan, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly six years, is charged with conspiracy and supporting terrorism, and prosecutors called witnesses to bolster their case that he is an "unlawful enemy combatant" eligible to face the special court.

The defense says he was one of several drivers for bin Laden and had no role in terrorist attacks.

"Around bin Laden were many people who disagreed with him," civilian lawyer Charles Swift said.

Hamdan's attorneys want him declared a prisoner of war.

That would entitle him to greater legal protections than those afforded to prisoners at the Guantanamo base designated as unlawful enemy combatants.

Crouch said Hamdan left his native Yemen in 1996 to become an Islamic fighter in the former Soviet state of Tajikistan. After failing to get in, he ended up in Afghanistan, where he was hired as driver by bin Laden and later became a member of the leader's security detachment, the agent said.

Robert McFadden, a Department of Defense agent who interrogated the detainee in May 2003, said the detainee drove bin Laden's son, Uthman, at least once with the al-Qaeda leader. Hamdan, who is now about 37, was paid US$200 to US$300 a month plus US$100 for housing, he said.

Just before the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, Hamdan helped evacuate bin Laden's compound in Afghanistan, Crouch said.

"This was going to be the first time Osama bin Laden was going to go toe-to-toe or face-to-face with the United States and he was unsure what the reaction would be," the agent testified.

Earlier, a US Army officer described Hamdan's capture, saying he was not in uniform when he was captured in November 2001 in Afghanistan while driving a car with two surface-to-air missiles inside. The testimony was intended to underscore the US contention that Hamden was not a soldier deserving prisoner of war status.
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