Legal News

Prosecutor Says Hamdan Heard Bin Laden Describe Target of United 93

By Dan Slater

When the prosecutor delivered his opening statement in the military commission trial of Salim Hamdan — Osama bin Laden’s former driver — he said he would show that Hamdan heard bin Laden describe the target of United Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in a field just outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 44 people aboard. Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone said bin Laden had said the plane was headed for “the dome,” apparently in reference to the U.S. Capitol. (For reports on the second of the trial, click here for the WSJ’s and here for the NYT’s.)

Salim Hamdan attends his trial inside the war crimes courthouse at Camp Justice, the legal complex of the U.S. Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, July 22, 2008. (AP Photo/Janet Hamlin, Pool)

Defense lawyer Harry Schneider, reports the WSJ, responded that Hamdan was a simple laborer who neither espoused nor acted on radical beliefs, as attorneys for Hamdan have claimed all along.

Hamdan, who was detained in November, 2001, is charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. He faces a potential life term if convicted. Separately, five men accused of organizing the 9/11 attacks are awaiting trial for the deaths of some 3,000 people.

In addition to a government witness identified only as “Sergeant Major A,” who testified that he supervised the Afghans who captured Hamdan and attended the initial interrogations, the government called FBI agent Ali Soufan, who said he interrogated Hamdan three times at Gitmo. Based on reports, there were at least two interesting parts of Soufan’s testimony.

First, he said he won Hamdan’s confidence through such gestures as bringing him fish sandwiches from McDonald’s (yes, there’s a Micky D’s in Guantanamo Bay, as well as a Pizza Hut and a Starbucks), sending him an automotive magazine and arranging for him to make a phone call to his wife.

But another portion of Soufan’s testimony, reports the NYT, underscored the differences between civilian trials and those permitted by the 2006 law that established the military commission system. When Soufan testified that Gitmo was the only place where he didn’t tell people he interrogated that they had a right not to give self-incriminating statements, one of the prosecutors, John Murphy, seemed to struggle in noting for the jury why defendants elsewhere were told of rights absent at Gitmo. “All right,” he asked rhetorically of Soufan, “that’s a different court system than the commission system here?”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 23, 2008 (boomark / email).