Word: qaeda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 sheik when he relocated for security reasons to Tarnak Farms, a walled al-Qaeda 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. Both men describe Hamdan as deferential, eager to please. Their accounts differ, though, when it comes to Hamdan's level...
...started writing a book about his case, and I 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 this week. Like few other cases, his story sheds light on how the Bush Administration has prosecuted the war on terrorism since 9/11, and where it might be heading...
...days leading up to 9/11, Hamdan joined a small motorcade of al-Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who drove into the mountains above Khost to watch the hijacked planes crash into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on satellite TV. Hamdan was also at bin Laden's side - as a driver - in the weeks that followed, while the motorcade moved from one guesthouse to the next as bin Laden and al-Zawahiri readied their remaining fighters for America's imminent invasion...
...would be arrested if he tried to cross the border, so he instead dropped off his family and planned to return the car, which he had borrowed, before finding a different way into Pakistan. Soufan and government prosecutors say that Hamdan remained in Afghanistan to fight alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Their account is corroborated by the fact that the Northern Alliance forces who captured Hamdan in Afghanistan hours after he left his family at the border found two surface-to-air missiles in the trunk...
...Hamdan was flown to Guantánamo Bay, where he became detainee No. 149. Soon after, he met Soufan, the FBI's foremost expert on al-Qaeda, who interrogated Hamdan repeatedly until December 2003, when President Bush chose him from among thousands of detainees in U.S. custody to be the first Arab defendant in the military tribunals...