Word: qaeda
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...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...
...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...
...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...