A former driver for Osama bin Laden denied on Wednesday that he had sworn an oath of loyalty to the al-Qaeda leader, contradicting potentially damaging testimony from a US Defense Department interrogator.
Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, testified at his war crimes trial that a nine-hour interrogation in May 2003 focused almost entirely on whether he swore an Islamic oath, or bayat, to his boss, but he refused to discuss the topic.
“I never talked to them about this issue,” Hamdan told the judge through an Arabic interpreter. “I never pledged allegiance.”
Judge Keith Allred, a Navy captain, is evaluating whether the interrogation is tainted by coercion and therefore inadmissible as evidence at the first American war crimes trial since World War II. He said he would issue a ruling yesterday.
If the judge allows the jury to hear testimony of Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent Robert McFadden, it would contradict the defense lawyers’ claim that Hamdan was merely a low-level bin Laden employee with no allegiance to al-Qaeda.
McFadden said he would testify that Hamdan acknowledged taking “an oath of allegiance to bin Laden and the cause, the cause being expelling Jews and Christians from the Arabian peninsula.”
Hamdan was captured at a roadblock in southern Afghanistan in November 2001 with two surface-to-air missiles in the car.
He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted of conspiracy and supporting terrorism.
Allred, who has dismissed other statements Hamdan made under “coercive” conditions, said he would hold this interrogation to a high standard to penalize the government for delivering hundreds of pages of prison records after court-imposed deadlines.
“You’re on the hot seat,” Allred told prosecutors.
Prosecutors said they have taken steps to prevent future delays and should not lose a vital piece of evidence as punishment.
McFadden, an Arabic speaker, is the only one of nearly a dozen US agents to testify at trial that Hamdan swore the loyalty oath.
Hamdan is one of 21 prisoners facing charges at Guantanamo.
His defense team has been sifting through more than 1,000 pages of new records, some of them delivered after the start of trial, for material supporting Hamdan’s allegations he was subjected to sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and sexual humiliation during more than six years at Guantanamo.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un sent Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) greetings with what appeared to be restrained rhetoric that comes as Pyongyang moves closer to Russia and depends less on its long-time Asian ally. Kim wished “the Chinese people greater success in building a modern socialist country,” in a reply message to Xi for his congratulations on North Korea’s birthday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported yesterday. The 190-word dispatch had little of the florid language that had been a staple of their correspondence, which has declined significantly this year, an analysis by Seoul-based specialist service NK Pro showed. It said
On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it — a rat. The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on Saint Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life. That is because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird
‘CLOSER TO THE END’: The Ukrainian leader said in an interview that only from a ‘strong position’ can Ukraine push Russian President Vladimir Putin ‘to stop the war’ Decisive actions by the US now could hasten the end of the Russian war against Ukraine next year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday after telling ABC News that his nation was “closer to the end of the war.” “Now, at the end of the year, we have a real opportunity to strengthen cooperation between Ukraine and the United States,” Zelenskiy said in a post on Telegram after meeting with a bipartisan delegation from the US Congress. “Decisive action now could hasten the just end of Russian aggression against Ukraine next year,” he wrote. Zelenskiy is in the US for the UN
A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with Swiss police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested. The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border. The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country, but assisted dying has been legal for decades. On the same day it was used, Swiss Department of Home