The first war crimes trial at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, got underway Monday with the defendant's plea and jury selection in the military tribunal of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver and bodyguard for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. - Hamdan, wearing a khaki prison jumpsuit instead of the flowing white robe and headdress he wore at pretrial hearings, pleaded not guilty to the charges against him. - Judge Keith Allred, a navy captain, then called a jury pool of U.S. military officers into the courtroom and began reading them instructions. - "You must impartially hear the evidence," Allred told the potential jurors. "He must be presumed to be innocent." - The 13 officers were hand-picked by the Pentagon and flown in from other U.S. bases over the weekend. Hamdan's lawyers asked whether they had any friends or family affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings to see whether any should be excluded as too biased to serve. A minimum of five of the 13 officers must be selected for the trial. - Hamdan stands accused by the United States government of conspiracy and providing support to terrorism and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted. His military trial is the first of any of the 775 prisoners who have been held at Guantanamo Bay since it was set up in 2001 to hold suspects in the U.S.'s so-called war on terrorism. - "It will be unlike anything that has ever been seen before, and in fact there hasn't been a war crimes tribunal like this in the U.S. since World War II," the CBC's Nahlah Ayed said from Washington, D.C. - Hamdan, a Yemeni who has admitted he was bin Laden's driver, but says he took the job because he needed the $200 monthly salary and not to become a militant, was captured in November 2001 in Afghanistan. The U.S. contends that he helped bin Laden escape capture on several occasions and transported weapons for al-Qaeda. Test of tribunal p...
The first war crimes trial at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, got underway Monday with ...
