Driver: U.S. missed chances at bin Laden

GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — In his seventh of month of U.S. captivity, Osama bin Laden's driver told two FBI agents that it was the United States' fault that the al-Qaida leader is alive.

The message was, "You had these opportunities, America. You didn't do anything," FBI agent George Crouch Jr. testified Friday at Salim Hamdan's war-crimes trial.

The United States could have killed bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, before he moved to Afghanistan in 1996, Hamdan told his interrogators. They could have killed him after al-Qaida's 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. Or after the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, in Aden, Yemen, which left 17 U.S. sailors dead.

Instead, "bin Laden was emboldened." So he struck with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and nearly 3,000 people died.

Crouch was paraphrasing a portion of a nearly two-week interrogation he conducted at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in June 2002, about the time that FBI agents arranged Hamdan's first call home.

They let the Yemeni man speak to his wife for up to 10 minutes with a satellite phone. He told her for the first time that he was alive, and then he cried.

Hamdan, 37, appeared to pay intense attention to much of the testimony. He is charged with conspiracy and material support for terrorism in a six-year string of terrorism attacks, which can result in a life sentence if he is convicted.

Crouch cast the telephone call as a turning point.

Hamdan "cried quite a bit," the FBI agent testified, and he began to tell his story more freely, particularly to a Lebanese-born FBI agent named Ali Soufan.

"Mr. Hamdan gave us a lot of good information," Crouch said, and was consistently "polite" and "respectful."

Interrogations became so congenial, Crouch said, that they brought him pizza and subs, and the Yemeni man learned something every American teenager knows: McDonald's french fries "are not good cold."

Crouch said under defense cross-examination that if he had interrogated Hamdan anywhere but Guantánamo Bay, he would have advised him that what he said could be used against him.

"I would have read him his rights," Crouch said. The FBI, like more than a dozen other U.S. government agencies, has had a policy against extending constitutional rights, including the protection against self-incrimination, to Guantánamo prisoners.

Through testimony in the first week of the military commission, defense attorneys sought to cast Hamdan as a cooperative captive who had helped the United States in its war-on-terrorism effort at a time hard-core terrorists were resisting.

As though to accentuate their point, they got in the court record through cross-examination that the chief bodyguard in bin Laden's security detail was held at Guantánamo, defied his interrogators and was sent home to Morocco in 2004.

Prosecutors disputed that Hamdan was a bit player and cast him as not only a driver and sometime bodyguard but also a Taliban-al-Qaida weapons runner.

Moreover, Justice Department prosecutor John Murphy, on loan to the Pentagon, sought to shift the blame back on the Yemeni father of two with a fourth-grade education.

Of al-Qaida, he asked Crouch: "Does its success rest upon certain members doing certain tasks?"

"Without people willing to do logistics and more menial tasks, al-Qaida as we know it couldn't exist," Crouch replied. "Without people like Mr. Hamdan, bin Laden would enjoy no support. He would not enjoy protection, and he would probably not have been able to elude capture to this point."

Material from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.