WASHINGTON - The prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, whose case has temporarily caused the shutdown of military tribunals for suspected terrorists has admitted he was a driver for Osama bin Laden but denied having other ties to the al-Qaida network, according to court papers released yesterday.
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 35-year-old from Yemen, said he tried to flee Afghanistan when war broke out there after Sept. 11, 2001, but was captured and shipped in 2002 to the prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, where he was beaten by American soldiers. He said he was held for months in solitary confinement and threatened with more harm if he did not plead guilty to war crimes.
But according to military charges against him that also were included in the new legal papers, Hamdan was so close to bin Laden as his driver and bodyguard that he knew the terror leader was behind the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, the assault on the Navy destroyer USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and the Sept. 11 airplane attacks in New York and at the Pentagon.
Furthermore, the military said, Hamdan routinely delivered weapons, ammunition and other supplies to al-Qaida members, attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, and accompanied bin Laden on trips where he gave speeches encouraging "martyr missions."
The new documents were in a petition filed by Hamdan's lawyers asking the U.S. Supreme Court to permanently shut down the military commissions, also known as tribunals, at Guantanamo Bay. In their place, the defense lawyers want detainees tried in a military court-martial or a federal court to better protect their rights.
Hamdan is one of four prisoners whose cases were being prepared for tribunals, and the documents for the first time spotlight the government's evidence and his own defense.
"Mr. Hamdan wants a trial," his military lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, said in an interview yesterday. "But not a trial without an independent judiciary and where you can't confront the evidence against you. Is that really a trial?"
Under the tribunal system, prisoners would be prosecuted and defended by U.S. military lawyers, before a judge and jury also wearing the U.S. uniform.
Pre-trial hearings were under way, with the first tribunal expected next month or in January, until U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington ruled Nov. 8 that tribunals were invalid under U.S. and international law. The Pentagon put the entire system on hold at Guantanamo Bay, where about 550 prisoners are held.
The government appealed the ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a process that could take two years. Now, Hamdan's lawyers are trying to speed up that timetable by appealing directly to the Supreme Court.
In his request to the Supreme Court, Swift attached a copy of a four-page affidavit that Hamdan signed last February, in which he maintained that he was not a bin Laden operative but instead had gone from Yemen to Afghanistan to work as a commercial driver to support his young family.
"I have never been a member of al-Qaida and I am not a terrorist," Hamdan said.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
