Topic: Detainee's Loyalty To Bin Laden Is At Issue In Hearing

New York Times
December 7, 2007 By William Glaberson
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba, Dec. 6 — For several years, a slight Yemeni detainee with a wispy beard, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, has been at the center of legal battles challenging the Bush administration’s Guantánamo policies. He was a driver for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, and his lawyers have cast him as little more than a low-level employee, a simple man who was just trying to support his wife and daughters.
In a daylong hearing here on Thursday, military prosecutors challenged that image, presenting testimony that Mr. Hamdan told investigators he had sworn an oath to Mr. bin Laden, carried a gun, carted weapons and could barely repress his approval of the terror leader.
In the courtroom here, a prosecutor asked a government investigator, Robert McFadden, how Mr. Hamdan had described his emotions in regard to Mr. bin Laden during interrogations in 2003.
“Uncontrollable enthusiasm,” Mr. McFadden answered.
The testimony came during a hearing to determine whether Mr. Hamdan can be defined as an unlawful enemy combatant, which would give prosecutors a green light to proceed with a war crimes trial against him. The military judge did not rule on the question on Thursday.
The hearing was the latest turn in a legal fight that went to the Supreme Court last year and brought one of a series of landmark rulings in the Bush administration’s battles over its detention policies.
Through the testimony of two of his former interrogators, the prosecutors portrayed Mr. Hamdan as a knowing participant in Mr. bin Laden’s circle. He said he knew Mr. bin Laden was tied to major terrorist attacks and that he had learned before the Sept. 11 attacks that an operation was about to take place, according to the testimony of Mr. McFadden, a Defense Department counterintelligence investigator, and another former interrogator, George M. Crouch Jr.
“He was actually driving Osama bin Laden and his son,” during a long road trip around Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, evidently to avoid detection by Americans, said Mr. Crouch, an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
He said Mr. Hamdan described his overhearing of Mr. bin Laden’s saying he “was very pleased” by the Sept. 11 death toll, Mr. Crouch said.
In cross-examination, a defense lawyer, Harry H. Schneider Jr., asked Mr. Crouch if Mr. Hamdan had ever expressed joy over the attacks. He had not, the agent admitted. But a prosecutor later had Mr. McFadden say that Mr. Hamdan had never expressed remorse over them, either.
Convoys of vehicles in which Mr. Hamdan drove were carefully assembled, Mr. Crouch testified. He said Mr. Hamdan had described using nondescript vehicles with tinted windows and two-way radios so the drivers could talk to one another. Bodyguards in the caravans, the agent said, carried Kalashnikov rifles.
Mr. Hamdan was captured by Afghan forces on a highway to Kandahar in November 2001. The prosecutors say that two surface-to-air missiles were found in his hatchback.
The defense lawyers have challenged those claims, and they had some success on Thursday, introducing documents from the case of another Guantánamo detainee that said the missiles “were obtained from” two Arabs killed that same day on the highway.
But the prosecutors called an Army major, Henry Smith, who said he had seen the missiles in Mr. Hamdan’s car soon after Afghan forces detained Mr. Hamdan.
Major Smith said he had watched as the Afghans pulled Mr. Hamdan off toward what has turned into years of detention. “He was resisting to some degree, dragging his feet,” Major Smith said. “He wasn’t happy.”