|
Guantanamo: FBI agents testify
17/07/2008 09:30 - (SA)
Mike Melia
Cuba - A one-time driver for Osama bin Laden helped the FBI try to track down his boss after being captured in Afghanistan, his former interrogators testified on Wednesday.
Salim Hamdan led agents to the al-Qaeda chief's compounds in Kandahar and mapped out his movements among safehouses, training camps and other remote corners of Afghanistan in the month following the September 11 attacks, FBI special agent Robert Fuller said at a pretrial hearing.
The US military is now preparing to use the interrogations against Hamdan at the first American war-crimes trial since World War II. The Yemeni prisoner faces a maximum life sentence if convicted of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.
Hamdan's Pentagon-appointed attorney, Navy Lt Cmdr Brian Mizer, said the US is not sufficiently taking into account the help that Hamdan provided following his capture.
"It's awfully suspicious for someone who is a hard-core al-Qaeda member as prosecutors claim," he told reporters.
One interrogator from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Michael St Ours, said Hamdan acknowledged being close enough to bin Laden to know he was planning a major operation a week before the September 11 attacks.
"He told us that after 9/11 took place, he asked bin Laden if that was the operation he was talking about, to which he said 'Yes,"' St Ours said.
Hamdan, whose trial is scheduled to begin next week, was captured by Afghan forces at a roadblock in November 2001 and turned over to the US, which quickly realised his value in the hunt for bin Laden.
'It really hurt what was going on and what we were trying to accomplish'
He drew maps identifying key locations including a guesthouse frequented by al-Qaeda members, according to testimony on Wednesday. Hamdan's assistance continued after he arrived at Guantanamo in May 2002.
"I was trying to gain information from an individual who could help us," said St Ours, who questioned Hamdan here three times the month he arrived in Cuba.
Prosecutors called Hamdan's interrogators to refute claims that he was coerced into making statements to be used against him at trial, and five agents said they never heard Hamdan raise allegations of abuse.
But a sixth, FBI agent George Crouch, said Hamdan told him he had been moved into solitary confinement during their sessions here in July 2002. Crouch said he protested to military commanders at the detention centre, who moved him out of solitary, but he could not re-establish rapport.
"It really hurt what was going on and what we were trying to accomplish," Crouch said.
Also on Wednesday, the military judge in the case denied a defence challenge arguing that the charges against Hamdan were not established as crimes at the time.
Defence lawyers had said the charges were therefore illegal under the Constitution, which the US Supreme Court recently found has at least some applications to Guantanamo detainees.
The Bush administration set out to prosecute Guantanamo detainees nearly seven years ago, but the tribunals have been delayed by repeated legal setbacks. Hamdan is one of 20 inmates facing charges.
A US federal judge in Washington has scheduled a hearing on Thursday on whether to halt Hamdan's trial as he reviews whether the offshore prosecutions violate the Constitution.
|
News
