The case against Osama's driver

AP:

A driver for Osama bin Laden wore no uniform and was in a car with two surface-to-air missiles when he was captured in Afghanistan, a U.S. Army officer recalled Thursday in a hearing to determine whether the detainee can be prosecuted in a special military court.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who has been held at Guantanamo for nearly six years, was stopped at a roadblock in southern Afghanistan in November 2001 and turned over to U.S. forces, who interrogated him and kept him mostly hooded and restrained for about five days, Army Maj. Hank Smith said at the pretrial hearing.

"We tried to make sure he was as well-treated as possible," said Smith, adding that medics regularly checked Hamdan, who was given food and water.

Under questioning from the prosecutor, Smith said Hamdan had no visible insignia or obvious uniform — reinforcing the government's argument that he was an "unlawful enemy combatant" who can be prosecuted under the U.S. Military Commissions Act.

The defense says Hamdan was just a low-level bin Laden employee, not a hard-core terrorist, and thus beyond the jurisdiction of the U.S. military tribunals.

Under questioning by the prosecutor, Smith suggested that the Taliban fighters could not be legally categorized as soldiers who are protected by the Geneva Conventions as prisoners of war — in part because they lacked uniforms.

"I would not say they had distinctive insignia," he testified.

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Prosecutors prepared about five witnesses to back their case that Hamdan should be charged as an unlawful enemy combatant. The defense lined up an expert in Middle Eastern affairs to support its argument that Hamdan could have been a driver for bin Laden without being a hardcore al-Qaida member who knew about terrorist attacks.

But a military judge on Wednesday rejected a defense request to talk to the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and two other so-called "high value" detainees who are being held at the isolated Navy base.

Civilian defense attorney Harry Schneider told reporters that he had hoped that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the two other high-value detainees could establish that Hamdan was not a terrorist, and was a minor al-Qaida figure at best.

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If the defense can persuade a judge to declare Hamdan a prisoner of war, he would be subject to the American military court martial system, which detainee advocates say offers more legal protections.

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Even if the defense got a chance to present KSM it would not prove anything beyond his own knowledge which would be limited by what he saw and to some extent heard. That would be unlikely to overcome the physical evidence that appears to be overwhelming that he was an unlawful combatant. Hopefully, more people will come to understand the enemy's violations of the Geneva Conventions and why they are not entitled to POW status. It is pretty clear that the terrorist rights left in this country does not comprehend the concept.

This later Reuters report ads more details to the case against Hamdan.

A Guantanamo prisoner facing U.S. war crimes charges drove Osama bin Laden when he evacuated his compound in Afghanistan ahead of the September 11 attacks, an FBI agent testified on Thursday.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as bin Laden's $200-a-month driver and bodyguard, also heard the al Qaeda leader say he had expected up to 1,500 deaths in the attacks but was pleased to learn there were many more, said FBI agent George Crouch Jr., one of a team of FBI agents who interviewed Hamdan at Guantanamo.

Hamdan also drove bin Laden when he evacuated his compound in Afghanistan around the time of the 1998 bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, Crouch said. Those attacks killed 224 people in Kenya and Tanzania and were blamed on bin Laden's network.

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We will probably learn more about his adventures in the coming days. The evidence suggest he was a close and trusted associate of bin Laden. It will be interesting to hear how he got separated from him during the retreat from the US attacks.