Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...when I started writing a book about his case, and have spent hundreds of hours interviewing his lawyers, his family, his mentor and his interrogator. From these conversations I have been able to assemble a portrait of Hamdan's extraordinary journey from the deserts of Yemen to an al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan to the dock of the U.S. military tribunal he entered on July 21. Like few others, his story sheds light on how the Bush Administration has prosecuted the war on terrorism since 9/11, and where it might be heading...
Seventeen of the original 35 jihadis decided to stay. Hamdan was one of them. With only a fourth-grade education, Hamdan made himself useful as a mechanic and driver. He ultimately ended up serving bin Laden himself as a chauffeur and bodyguard, following the al-Qaeda leader when he relocated for security reasons to Tarnak Farms, a walled compound 30 minutes outside Kandahar. According to both al-Bahri and fbi interrogator Ali Soufan, Hamdan had bin Laden's trust but was not a member of his inner circle. Their accounts differ when it comes to Hamdan's level of involvement...
...driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, because he believes they were obtained under "highly coercive" conditions. That doesn't bode well for future tribunals in cases where U.S. interrogators used even harsher techniques - such as the waterboarding used on confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - to extract confessions from suspected al-Qaeda members...
...close to the surface the animosity between Sunnis and Shi'ites remains. ... The way that the tribal leaders and the provincial officials describe the Shi'ites in Baghdad was indicative of a deep-seated lack of trust. And the fact that the violence has lessened and that AQI [Al-Qaeda in Iraq] really has been routed does not answer the larger possibility of a return to sectarian violence unless that trust issue is resolved...
...Hamdan was not necessarily an obvious choice for this historic role. He wasn't a high-ranking officer of al-Qaeda, nor was he known to have participated in any specific terrorist operations against the U.S. But from the prosecutor's perspective, he did have certain things going for him. Because the military tribunal system was brand-new, the government thought it made sense to try lower-ranking operatives first, in case anything went wrong. Hamdan had also been in U.S. custody since his capture and had not been rendered to any foreign countries for interrogation, which might have opened...