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Panel's Sentence Of Driver For Bin Laden Is 51/2 Years

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The Washington Post

Published: August 8, 2008

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - A former driver for Osama bin Laden was sentenced Thursday to 51/2 years in prison for his material support for terrorism, a relatively light sentence that means the first detainee at Guantanamo Bay to face a full military commission trial could be released from custody in just five months.

The six military officers who found Salim Ahmed Hamdan guilty Wednesday of terror charges came back with the sentence Thursday afternoon, knowing that the judge in the case was going to give Hamdan credit for the five years and one month of his pretrial incarceration at Guantanamo.

Hamdan, whose case at one point reached the Supreme Court and forced the government to retool its trial system for terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo, received the first verdict under a full military commission and arguably both won and lost. He was convicted of supporting al-Qaida by driving and guarding bin Laden and ferrying weapons for the terror group, but he was acquitted of charges alleging terror conspiracy and escaped a potential life sentence.

It is unclear what will happen to Hamdan after he finishes serving his remaining time because military prosecutors and military commission officials have argued they have the ability to hold enemy combatants indefinitely, until the end of hostilities in the so-called war on terror. Although the Bush administration could order him held, officials could also transfer him to the custody of his home country, Yemen, or release him outright.

At the sentencing hearing, Hamdan had pleaded for a light sentence and apologized to U.S. victims of terrorist attacks. "It was a sorry or sad thing to see innocent people killed," he was quoted as saying.

"I personally present my apologies to them if anything what I did have caused them pain."

Hamdan admitted he kept working for the al-Qaida leader after he learned that bin Laden had planned terrorist attacks.

He 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 jurors. 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, 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.

Prosecutors called for a sentence of at least 30 years in prison and implored jurors to consider a life term.

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

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