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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 have testified.

Salim Hamdan led agents to the al-Qaeda chief’s compounds in Kandahar and mapped out his movements among safe houses, training camps and other remote corners of Afghanistan in the month after the September 11 attacks, FBI special agent Robert Fuller said at a pretrial hearing yesterday.

The US military is 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 lawyer, navy Lt-Cdr Brian Mizer, said the US was not sufficiently taking into account the help that Hamdan provided after his capture.

“It’s awfully suspicious for someone who is a hardcore al-Qaeda member as prosecutors claim,” Lt-Cdr Mizer said.

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’,” Mr 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.

He drew maps identifying key locations including a guesthouse frequented by al-Qaeda members, according to testimony yesterday.

The military judge in the case yesterday 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 application to Guantanamo detainees.

Also yesterday, the Canadian Government said it wouldn’t seek the repatriation of a detainee in US custody at Guantanamo, despite video footage showing the then teenager sobbing for his mother and pleading for Canada’s help.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the video of Toronto-born terror suspect Omar Khadr being interrogated by Canadian officials in 2003 would not sway his government’s position that Khadr must remain at the US prison to face trial.

Khadr’s lawyers released the video footage yesterday to help persuade the PM to seek the detainee’s return before a US military tribunal in Guantanamo later this year.

Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that a killed US soldier during a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan. He was 15 when captured.

He is Guantanamo Bay’s lone remaining detainee from a Western country and its youngest prisoner.

The seven hours of grainy footage, recorded over four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence agents in 2003, shows Khadr, then 16, breaking down in tears.

At one point he pleads for medical help for chest and back wounds he says have not healed six months after his capture.

The release of the footage, the first to be seen publicly of interrogations inside the US military prison, prompted the Opposition and human rights groups to demand that Khadr be returned to Canada.

July 18th, 2008 | Category: F.B.I., Salim Hamdan, Sleep Deprivation, Torture |  Print This Post | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL