FBI agent testifies on Gitmo prisoner

updated 10:06 p.m. ET Dec. 6, 2007

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A Yemeni admitted he was a driver for Osama bin Laden and knew of the al-Qaida leader’s role in the Sept. 11 attack, an FBI agent testified Thursday, countering defense assertions that the detainee was a minor employee with no role in terrorism.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan told FBI agents that he had chauffeured bin Laden around Afghanistan in an al-Qaida convoy after Sept. 11 and overheard the leader say he had expected only up to 1,500 people to be killed in the attack, 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 one of a dozen interrogation sessions at Guantanamo in the summer of 2002.

The testimony, which revealed more about the allegations against Hamdan than previously known, came in a pretrial hearing to determine whether the detainee can be prosecuted before the first U.S. military tribunals since the World War II era. Hamden, who has been held at Guantanamo Bay for nearly six years, is charged with conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

Prosecutors called witnesses to bolster their case that Hamdan is an unlawful enemy combatant eligible to face the special court. The defense maintains he was only one of several drivers for bin Laden and had no knowledge or role in any terrorist attacks.

Defense lawyers want him declared a prisoner of war, which would entitle him to greater legal protections than those now afforded to prisoners at Guantanamo who are designated as “unlawful enemy combatants.”

Worked closely with bin Laden, agent says
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, Hamden 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.

Just before the 1998 al-Qaida bombings of the U.S. embassies in the East African nations of Tanzania and Kenya, Hamdan helped evacuate bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan, at the orders of superiors who feared retaliation, Crouch testified.

“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 said.

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