Osama bin Laden's driver apologised today in a US war crimes court at Guantanamo for any pain his services to al-Qaeda caused its US victims before being sentenced to 66 months in prison for providing material support to terrorists.
"I don't know what could be given or presented to these innocent people who were killed in the US," Salim Hamdan told a jury of six military officers deciding his fate after convicting him of providing material support for terrorism.
"I personally present my apologies to them if anything what I did have caused them pain," he said through an Arabic-English interpreter at the first US war crimes tribunal since World War Two.
A forensic psychiatrist who interviewed the Yemeni captive at the US naval base in Cuba reported that Hamdan wept when he first saw videotape of planes crashing into the World Trade Towers in the September 11th attacks, and that he prayed for the victims.
The six jurors, whose names are secret, convicted Hamdan yesterday on charges of providing material support for terrorism by working as a driver and occasional armed bodyguard and weapons courier for bin Laden in Afghanistan from 1996 to November 2001.
They sentenced Hamdan, who is about 40, to serve five and a half years pn prison. He has already spent six years at Guantanamo.
Prosecutor John Murphy had suggested the tears and remorse were fake and said Hamdan should be locked away for at least 30 years.
His actions "changed our world as we knew it, changed it dramatically in our lifetime and perhaps changed it forever," Mr Murphy said. "His penalty should be so significant that it forecloses any possibility that he reestablishes his ties with terrorists."
Defence lawyer Charles Swift said Hamdan deserved a sentence of less than four years because his cooperation with US intelligence services more than outweighed his culpability as a member of bin Laden's motor pool in Afghanistan.
He said Hamdan never shared bin Laden's ideology and was merely a paid driver ridiculed by al-Qaeda insiders as "a simple Bedouin who changed the oil."
Hamdan said he was stunned to learn bin Laden was behind the bombing of the USS Colewarship in a Yemeni port in 2000. But he went back to work for him because he could not find another job that paid enough to support his family. "I couldn't beg," Hamdan said. "I had to work."
He earned $200 a month and called his relationship with bin Laden respectful and professional. He said he initially believed Yemeni news reports that Israeli secret agents were the ones who sent a boat full of explosives into the Cole. The attack blew a hole in the ship and killed 17 US sailors.
When he learned a month later that the al-Qaeda leader was behind the attack, "It was a big shock for me," Hamdan said. "The way I look to bin Laden changed a lot."
Nonetheless, he said, he continued working for bin Laden and "I was thinking to myself, God willing, this would not occur a second time."
Reuters