Bin Laden's Driver Admits Knowing Employer Planned Attacks

Hamdan Says His Only Motive Was Supporting His Family

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 7 -- Osama bin Laden's former driver stood before a military jury on Thursday and admitted that he kept working for the al-Qaeda leader even after he learned that bin Laden had planned terrorist attacks.

But Salim Ahmed Hamdan said his only motive was supporting his family. The Yemeni father of two, who has a fourth-grade education, said he needed a job and that bin Laden paid well and treated him with respect.

Over time, his views of bin Laden changed, Hamdan told the six military jurors who will sentence him for supporting terrorism. Standing amid his lawyers, his head bowed, he acknowledged that he knew bin Laden was behind the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in a harbor in Yemen.

"It was a big shock for me when someone who had treated you, or we had treated each other with respect and regard and cordially, and then you realize what they were up to," Hamdan said through an Arabic translator.

Still, he kept coming back to bin Laden. "I had no choice," he said. "I decided to go back one more time to my work in Afghanistan with bin Laden."

Soon afterward, hijacked airplanes were crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001 -- what Hamdan called "the incident here in the United States." He said he was captured in November 2001 after driving his wife to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Hamdan was convicted on Wednesday of supporting al-Qaeda by driving and guarding bin Laden and ferrying weapons for the terror group. The jury in the first U.S. military commission since the end of World War II acquitted him of conspiring in terror attacks.

It is unclear if Hamdan's remarks, which were not under oath and came during a sentencing hearing before the same jury, will help his argument for a lenient prison term. He faces up to life in prison, though he is unlikely to be freed because the military has separately designated him an "enemy combatant."

Jurors were expected to begin their sentencing deliberations Thursday afternoon. A two-thirds vote -- four of the six jurors -- is required for a sentence, unless the term is more than 10 years. That would require the vote of three-fourths of the jurors.

Prosecutors called for a sentence of at least 30 years in prison and implored jurors to consider a life term. And they ridiculed Hamdan's statement before the military court at the U.S. detention facility here.

Calling Hamdan "a hardened al-Qaeda member," Justice Department prosecutor John Murphy urged "a very long sentence" because "anyone who provides material support for terrorism is a serious war criminal and a continuing threat to our society."

"Once you see your boss killing people, you leave," Murphy said. "You get another job. Period."