Prisoner helped bin Laden elude capture: FBI

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - A Guantanamo prisoner facing U.S. war crimes charges drove Osama bin Laden when he evacuated his compound in Afghanistan ahead of the September 11 attacks, an FBI agent testified on Thursday.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as bin Laden's $200-a-month driver and bodyguard, also heard the al Qaeda leader say he had expected up to 1,500 deaths in the attacks but was pleased to learn there were many more, said FBI agent George Crouch Jr., one of a team of FBI agents who interviewed Hamdan at Guantanamo.

Hamdan also drove bin Laden when he evacuated his compound in Afghanistan around the time of the 1998 bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa, Crouch said. Those attacks killed 224 people in Kenya and Tanzania and were blamed on bin Laden's network.

"This was the first time that Osama bin Laden was going to go toe-to-toe, face to face, with the United States and he did not know what the reaction was going to be," Crouch said he learned from his interviews with Hamdan.

The FBI agent's comments came as a judge began hearing the first witnesses in a U.S. military war crimes proceeding since the end of World War Two.

The testimony came during a pretrial hearing to determine whether Hamdan is an unlawful enemy combatant who can be tried on war crimes charges in a U.S. military tribunal set up to judge prisoners captured in the post-September 11, 2001, war on terrorism.

Army Maj. Henry Smith told the court earlier on Thursday that Hamdan was captured on November 24, 2001, at a checkpoint in a village near Kandahar while driving a car carrying two SA-7 anti-aircraft rockets without the launching mechanism.

"He was resisting to some degree, dragging his feet," Smith said of the moment when he first saw Hamdan. "He wasn't being dragged on the ground. He was being led away."

Hamdan arrived at the checkpoint minutes after a white van carrying three Arabs had been stopped, Smith said. He said two of the men offered resistance, including one who tried to detonate a grenade, and were killed in a burst of gunfire. The third man was detained and is a potential witness in the case.

Smith said Hamdan did not offer similar resistance and he was unaware of any weapons in Hamdan's possession other than the two anti-aircraft missiles without the launching mechanisms.

DENIES BEING AL QAEDA MEMBER

This is the military's third attempt to prosecute Hamdan on war crimes charges and comes six months after the judge in the case, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, dropped the previous charges against him.

Allred ruled in June that Hamdan had only been declared an enemy combatant and said he had no authority to decide whether the defendant was a lawful or unlawful combatant under a measure passed by Congress in 2006 to provide a legal basis for the war crimes trials formally known as military commissions.

Hamdan, who was born in Yemen around 1970, has acknowledged working for bin Laden in Afghanistan for $200 a month but denies he was a member of al Qaeda and has said he never took part in any terrorist attacks.

A U.S. Court of Military Commission Review ruled in September that commission judges do have the authority to hear evidence and decide whether prisoners are unlawful enemy combatants. That led to a third attempt to prosecute Hamdan, who is charged with conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

Only unlawful enemy combatants who are not U.S. citizens can be tried by a military commission, the law states. Lawful combatants, such as uniformed soldiers from countries at war with the United States, would have to be tried by court-martial or handled by other means, officials said.

The Guantanamo war crimes tribunals first convened in August 2004 but no witnesses were called in any previous hearings. Military legal experts say the testimony on Thursday was the first in a U.S. military war crimes proceeding since the trials that followed the Second World War.

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Peter Cooney)