Salim Ahmed Hamdan

An agitated Salim Ahmed Hamdan abruptly walked out of his war crimes trial Wednesday while the military jury watched a video in which the defendant was shown trussed, hooded and being badgered by armed and masked U.S. captors. Hamdan returned after about an hour and watched the rest of the nearly two-hour black-and-white video filmed in a crude cell in an Afghan village. The only illumination was a flashlight into his face.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan may have been only a driver for Osama bin Laden, but the legions of bit players in Al Qaeda are what has allowed the terrorist leader to succeed, an FBI agent testified Friday. "Without people like Mr. Hamdan, Bin Laden would enjoy no support, he would not enjoy protection and he probably would not have been able to elude capture up to this point," Special Agent George M. Crouch Jr. told the military jurors hearing the first U.S. war crimes case in 60 years.

Jurors hearing the first war crimes case against a Guantanamo prisoner watched a graphic 90-minute film chronicling the history of Al Qaeda on Monday, which included footage of mangled corpses in the rubble of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing in Kenya. The disturbing images, including some not previously released by U.S. authorities, were part of a film produced and narrated by a prosecution witness under contract with the tribunal hierarchy, the Office of Military Commissions.

Hoping to persuade a military judge to exclude a federal agent's key testimony in the trial of terrorism suspect Salim Ahmed Hamdan, defense lawyers Wednesday attempted to prove that coercive interrogation tactics were used on their client. Counter-terrorism specialist Robert McFadden said that during an interrogation he had elicited a statement from the former driver for Osama bin Laden that he had pledged an oath of loyalty to the Al Qaeda leader.

Two U.S. Army Special Forces officers who encountered terrorism suspect Salim Ahmed Hamdan after his November 2001 arrest in Afghanistan testified in secret at his trial Thursday because the events they discussed are classified. Special Forces psychologist Col. Morgan Banks and Lt. Col. Guy John Taylor, a military lawyer assigned to a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan at the time, testified for the defense for more than an hour each.

The war crimes case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan today goes to a jury of his enemies, hand-selected by the Pentagon official who charged him on behalf of a president who has ordered him imprisoned even if acquitted. "The eyes of the world are on Guantanamo Bay," U.S. District Judge James Robertson said July 17 in declining to halt the first trial by military commission. "Justice must be done there, and must be seen to be done there fairly and impartially." But as the first U.S.

The war crimes case against Salim Ahmed Hamdan went to the military jury Monday, with defense lawyers urging acquittal to restore the world's faith in U.S. respect for the rule of law and a prosecutor accusing the defendant of having protected Al Qaeda leaders so they could "kill another day." In closing arguments, a defense attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, made a surprising disclosure, suggesting that Hamdan had offered to help U.S.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's onetime driver and the first of only two terrorism suspects convicted at Guantanamo Bay, is being transferred from the offshore prison to his Yemeni homeland, a government lawyer familiar with the case said Monday. Hamdan, who is about 40, was found guilty of material support for terrorism by a six-member military jury in August.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver and bodyguard for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, arrived in his Yemeni homeland after being released from Guantanamo Bay, the Pentagon disclosed late Tuesday. The transfer Tuesday marked an end to the seven-year odyssey that began with the Yemeni's capture at a roadblock in Afghanistan as U.S. forces bombarded suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Defense lawyers for an alleged Al Qaeda plotter won permission to question witnesses, including the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind, after a military judge threatened to postpone the trial. The chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunals said a lawyer for Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, would get access to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other "high-value" detainees at the U.S. military prison in Cuba. "We've come to the point where the government needs to move," Judge Keith Allred, a Navy captain, told prosecutors, who had warned that security concerns could hamper efforts to arrange for a lawyer to question Mohammed before the trial begins Monday.