Prosecutors Open Case Against Hamdan

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – A former driver for Osama bin Laden was an al Qaeda member who supported terrorist acts and was aware of an impending strike just before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, prosecutors said today in opening statements in the first U.S. military commission trial since World War II.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan was bin Laden’s personal bodyguard and ferried weapons for al Qaeda, Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone told a six-member military jury at the U.S. detention facility here. Hamdan is charged with participating in a terrorism conspiracy and faces life in prison if convicted.

“You will not see evidence from the government that the accused ever fired a shot,” said Stone, who was dressed in a crisp white Navy uniform. “But what you will see is testimony regarding the accused’s role in al Qaeda, how he came to be a member of al Qaeda and how he helped, facilitated and provided material support for that organization.”

Stone also indicated that Hamdan may have known the target of the fourth hijacked airplane on Sept. 11, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field. But the details of that allegation were unclear from his statement. The commission that investigated the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon concluded that the intended target was the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

Defense lawyers for Hamdan, a Yemeni father of two in his late 30s, portrayed him as a salaried employee who never joined al Qaeda and never shared bin Laden’s extremist views.

“He worked for wages, he didn’t wage attacks on America,” said Harry Schneider, one of Hamdan’s civilian attorneys. “He had a job because he had to earn a living, not because he had a jihad against America.”

The opening arguments came after the military judge in Hamdan’s case ruled Monday night that prosecutors cannot use as evidence some statements Hamdan gave interrogators because they were obtained under “highly coercive” conditions while he was a captive in Afghanistan.

Navy Capt. Keith Allred threw out statements that Hamdan made after he was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, including detailed descriptions of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Some of Hamdan’s allegedly incriminating admissions made up a key part of the prosecution’s case against him.

But the judge declined to suppress admissions made by Hamdan after he arrived at Guantanamo, ruling that the Fifth Amendment did not apply to him and that “no coercive techniques influenced” what he said. Allred said, however, that to use the admissions, prosecutors must produce Hamdan’s interrogators to explain the conditions under which the questioning took place.

Prosecutors said Tuesday that they plan to introduce evidence gleaned from some interrogations of Hamdan at Guantanamo, where he allegedly detailed his role in al Qaeda. They did not refer to the banned statements from Afghanistan, but said jurors will see two videotaped interrogations of Hamdan recorded in Afghanistan that the judge allowed into evidence. Stone said the videos show Hamdan denying “any association with al Qaeda.”

Stone said prosecutors also will introduce another interrogation from Afghanistan that was not suppressed by the judge. Although that session yielded some incriminating details, Stone said, “by the time the accused agreed to provide that information” it “provides very little, if any, tactical information to the United States.”

Allred indicated this morning he also might eliminate evidence from another interrogation of Hamdan at Guantanamo in 2003. The judge had withheld a decision on that session because the defense has not had time to review 600 pages of material the government turned over Sunday night that documented Hamdan’s treatment.

After prosecutors protested that the material contained no relevant information, Allred said today: “I think the government is in a poor position this morning to get indignant.” The defense, he said, is “properly upset.”

Allred’s willingness to throw out evidence in a proceeding against an accused al Qaeda member could presage more trouble for the government in cases it expects to bring against planners of the Sept. 11 attacks, some of whom were subject to far more coercive conditions. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of those attacks, and other accused Sept. 11 conspirators are scheduled to be tried after Hamdan. The government has said Mohammed was subjected to “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning.

Hamdan pleaded not guilty Monday. His lawyers had sought to have his statements to interrogators thrown out because of the conditions of his captivity.