GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba: The first Guantanamo war crimes trial began yesterday with a not guilty plea from a former driver and alleged bodyguard for Osama Bin Laden.
Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, entered the plea through his lawyer at the US naval base in Cuba.
He is the first prisoner to face a US war crimes trial since World War II.
Judge Keith Allred, a navy captain, called a jury pool of uniformed American military officers into the courtroom for questioning by lawyers on both sides. A conviction on charges of conspiracy and supporting terrorism could lead to a life sentence for Hamdan.
“You must impartially hear the evidence,” Allred told the potential jurors. “He must be presumed to be innocent.” The 13 officers were handpicked by the Pentagon and flown in from other US bases over the weekend. Hamdan’s lawyers asked if they had any friends or family affected by the Sept. 11 attacks to see if any should be excluded as too biased to serve. A minimum of five officers must be selected for a trial under tribunal rules.
Hamdan, who is in his late 30s, wore a khaki prison jumpsuit to the courthouse overlooking an abandoned airport runway. The flowing white robe and headdress he wore at pretrial hearings were not cleaned in time for his trial, said Charles Swift, one of his civilian attorneys.
The trial is expected to take three to four weeks, with testimony from nearly two dozen Pentagon witnesses.
Hamdan was captured at a roadblock in Afghanistan in November 2001, allegedly with two surface-to-air missiles in the car. But his lawyers say he was merely a low-level driver and mechanic without any role in the Al-Qaeda conspiracy against the United States. Hamdan was taken to Guantanamo in May 2002 and selected as one of the first inmates to face prosecution. His case has created repeated legal obstacles for the Pentagon including a Supreme Court ruling that struck down an earlier version of the tribunal system.
Australian national David Hicks was to face a trial in Guantanamo in 2007 but pleaded guilty at a hearing before it began.
After being held without trial for five years, Hicks admitted to providing material support to terrorism as part of a deal that allowed him to return to his country where he served the remainder of his sentence. The Bush administration set up the special military commissions in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, saying terror suspects could not be adequately prosecuted in regular courts.
The indictment against Hamdan alleges that he met Bin Laden in the Afghan city of Kandahar in 1996 and “ultimately became a bodyguard and personal driver” of the Al-Qaeda leader.
It alleges that Hamdan received training in the use of rifles, handguns and machine guns in an Al-Qaeda camp and also “delivered weapons, ammunition or other supplies to Al-Qaeda members and associates.”
