A former driver for Osama bin Laden denied on Wednesday that he had sworn an oath of loyalty to the al-Qaeda leader, contradicting potentially damaging testimony from a US Defense Department interrogator.
Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, testified at his war crimes trial that a nine-hour interrogation in May 2003 focused almost entirely on whether he swore an Islamic oath, or bayat, to his boss, but he refused to discuss the topic.
“I never talked to them about this issue,” Hamdan told the judge through an Arabic interpreter. “I never pledged allegiance.”
Judge Keith Allred, a Navy captain, is evaluating whether the interrogation is tainted by coercion and therefore inadmissible as evidence at the first American war crimes trial since World War II. He said he would issue a ruling yesterday.
If the judge allows the jury to hear testimony of Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent Robert McFadden, it would contradict the defense lawyers’ claim that Hamdan was merely a low-level bin Laden employee with no allegiance to al-Qaeda.
McFadden said he would testify that Hamdan acknowledged taking “an oath of allegiance to bin Laden and the cause, the cause being expelling Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula.”
Hamdan was captured at a roadblock in southern Afghanistan in November 2001 with two surface-to-air missiles in the car.
He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.
Allred, who has dismissed other statements Hamdan made under “coercive” conditions, said he would hold this interrogation to a high standard to penalize the government for delivering hundreds of pages of prison records after court-imposed deadlines.
“You’re on the hot seat,” Allred told prosecutors.
Prosecutors said they have taken steps to prevent future delays and should not lose a vital piece of evidence as punishment.
McFadden, an Arabic speaker, is the only one of nearly a dozen US agents to testify at trial that Hamdan swore the loyalty oath.
Hamdan is one of 21 prisoners facing charges at Guantanamo.
His defense team has been sifting through more than 1,000 pages of new records, some of them delivered after the start of trial, for material supporting Hamdan’s allegations he was subjected to sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and sexual humiliation during more than six years at Guantanamo.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion