National Security Reporter
SANA'A, YEMEN–Salim Ahmed Hamdan opens the arched blue door to his home, sending a shaft of light outside that illuminates the evening street life of stray cats and young boys kicking stones.
The electricity has just come back on following the regular blackouts that occur after sunset.
Ducking inside, Hamdan slips off his sandals as two girls in identical outfits, thick red plastic belts cinching their tiny waists, step forward, extending their hennaed hands. The youngest, Selma, tries to keep her mouth closed to hide the gap where a baby tooth just fell out.
Hamdan smiles: "These are my daughters."
It is odd to see Guantanamo's most famous prisoner, the former chauffeur to terrorist Osama bin Laden, in such a prosaic domestic setting. Captured in Afghanistan in 2001, the former Al Qaeda insider who rubbed shoulders with those plotting to bomb Western targets is now simply a father of two young girls and husband to Umm Fatima.
Over three days last week, Hamdan gave a Star reporter and photographer a glimpse into his new life and talked about his desire to move past his former ones – with Al Qaeda and as the Gitmo prisoner who appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won.
He doesn't want to talk about working for bin Laden and would prefer to stay out of the headlines. "Hamdan this, Hamdan that, Hamdan all the time," he says in English with a wave of his hand.
But the 39-year-old knows that the international focus on Gitmo prisoners like him will not fade while closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base remains an issue for the Obama administration. And he agreed to talk publicly for the first time since being captured in November 2001 and shipped off to Cuba, because he says he cares about many of the nearly 230 remaining detainees, including Toronto-born captive Omar Khadr and the Yemenis he befriended while in custody.
They need a chance to rebuild their lives as he is trying to do, he says.
As he talks, reclining on cushions in his sitting room, his gaze often lingers on Selma. She's almost 8 years old but didn't get to know her father until he was released from prison eight months ago.
HAMDAN LEFT Guantanamo the way he had arrived – as a captive, handcuffed and shackled, his eyes covered with goggles and his ears with headphones. The military aircraft flew him directly from the Caribbean naval base to this southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, refuelling midflight. When he finally landed, an immigration official asked for his passport. Hamdan turned to his American escort and said, "Ask him."
Of the nearly 800 detainees who have been held at Guantanamo, only a few cases or names have gained international recognition like Hamdan's. Aside from Khadr, there is Australian David Hicks, the kangaroo skinner turned Talib, who returned home two years ago after his government lobbied for his release. In Britain, former prisoner Moazzam Begg has become a well-known human rights advocate and public speaker. Then there are the four Uighur detainees who were sent to Bermuda and are now working on a golf-course grounds crew.
But when Guantanamo recedes into history, it is the legal case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that will be remembered as the beginning of the end for the notorious prison. The landmark ruling concluded that president George W. Bush had abused his executive power and that Guantanamo was not beyond the reach of the U.S. courts.
The case was fodder for a bestselling book. George Clooney is reportedly planning a film in which he will play former navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Hamdan's Pentagon-appointed defence lawyer.
Hamdan's military commission last year also made history as the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II. A panel of six military officers convicted him of providing material support to terrorism, but acquitted him of the more serious charge of conspiracy. His lawyers depicted him as a lowly foot soldier who needed a job but felt "betrayed by bin Laden" when he learned of the 9/11 attacks.
A psychiatrist testified Hamdan was disturbed by the images of the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon being attacked by planes manned by his Al Qaeda colleagues. It "was hard on his soul," the psychiatrist recalled him saying. Hamdan told her he felt "that his head was going to explode."
SO HOW did a man with such seeming empathy end up as a chauffeur for Osama bin Laden?
Hamdan's indoctrination into Al Qaeda began when he was 26. He was poor and had nothing to do, so he left his home in picturesque Wadi Hadramaut and sought work in the capital, Sana'a. One day, lingering outside a mosque, he was asked if he would travel and was seduced by stories of jihad. Along with about 35 others, he agreed to go fight the Soviet occupation of Tajikistan but was eventually turned away at the border and travelled instead to Afghanistan in 1996, where bin Laden was bolstering Al Qaeda's ranks.
With his fourth-grade education and little promise of a decent life at home, Hamdan embraced becoming a holy warrior. As the years went on, he began scouting locations for meetings or driving bin Laden for a salary of $200 a month.
At his military trial his lawyers contended he was never fully committed to the life of a terrorist, or part of the inner group that knew of the 9/11 attacks. And once in Al Qaeda, it was hard to get out. He was part of the brotherhood.
Prosecutors countered that Hamdan was nonetheless a cog in Al Qaeda's machine and they repeatedly invoked the victims of the 9/11 attacks to persuade the military jurors. The Pentagon wanted Hamdan imprisoned for a minimum of 30 years. Instead, he was sentenced to 5 1/2 years with credit for time served.
The judge, navy Capt. Keith Allred, told Hamdan: "I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you're able to be a provider, a father and a husband in the best sense of all those terms."
Hamdan replied, "Inshallah" – God willing.
CONSIDERING YEMEN is one of the most desperate countries in the Middle East, with a 35 per cent unemployment rate, a Shiite rebellion raging in the northwest and a separatist movement in the south, Hamdan is fortunate.
Of the 15 Guantanamo detainees repatriated in Yemen over the past seven years, Hamdan is surviving better than most. He gets by with the only skill he knows well – driving.
It's not easy. Tourism has all but dried up due to the recent violence and it is rare to see a foreigner who isn't an embassy official with restrictions on where he or she can travel due to security concerns. Some days Hamdan's taxi fares do not cover the 3,000 Yemeni rials (roughly $15 U.S.) he pays for the car's use.
But he is a good taxi driver – an essential asset here in the late afternoons when the effects of the leafy narcotic khat take hold and the streets morph into what seems a violent video game with glazed-eyed masters at the controls. The Star paid him $70 to pick up another interviewee because so many people testified to his superb driving skills.
Recently, Hamdan's team of lawyers came here to visit him, along with the defence team's Baltimore translator, Towson University professor Charles Schmitz. ("He's Yemeni, not American," Hamdan says of his U.S. advocate and friend Chuck).
As the team emerged from the airport, they recognized Selma and her older sister Fatima from pictures Hamdan had shown them in Guantanamo. The girls ran to hug them before Hamdan strolled across the street. "You don't get many moments like that," said Harry Schneider, a lawyer with Seattle firm Perkins Coie. "It was something special."
Hamdan's name might be well-known in the country where he was born, but his face is not. As he walks along the market's narrow cobblestone pathways packed with vendors, their cheeks bulging with khat, what draws attention is the presence of foreigners, not Hamdan. He says that's why he invited the Star to take pictures of his daughters on the condition that he not be photographed himself.
Many prisoners who return from Guantanamo, or any jail for that matter, come back to a place they no longer know. But not when home is Yemen, the poor southern neighbour of Saudi Arabia, with a history that reaches into antiquity and where large swaths of the countryside abide by tribal laws of justice and retribution. Local magazine Yemen Today recently published a photo retrospective comparing historic pictures from decades ago to the same shot today. The only difference in most of the photos was that the modern images were in colour.
Hamdan agrees that it's not the daily routine here that is hard. It's getting over the memories of Guantanamo. "Everyone needs time to adjust" is all he will say, preferring not to talk in detail about those years spent in the U.S. prison.
As U.S. President Barack Obama focuses on closing Gitmo, he will have to consider where to send the nearly 100 remaining Yemeni detainees, some of whom are considered dangerous but cannot be prosecuted due to insufficient or tainted evidence.
There is a fear that after seven years in custody, even the innocent may harbour a deadly grudge.
WASHINGTON UNDERSTANDABLY views Yemen as a problem country, doubting the government's ability to control a burgeoning Al Qaeda movement, which claimed responsibility for last fall's deadly attack on the American embassy.
It's not unusual for Yemenis to say they support Al Qaeda's ideology, and discussions over the daily afternoon khat-chewing sessions often turn to the oppression of Muslims and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan or, increasingly, Somalia. And the ungoverned, autonomous tribal regions in the north have long made the country an attractive sanctuary for extremists.
Negotiations are reportedly ongoing with Saudi Arabia to send the Yemenis who will not be prosecuted to the neighbouring kingdom's rehabilitation program. But cultural, political and religious differences may make the program's effectiveness doubtful.
"Sending them to Saudi Arabia is illogical and probably counterproductive," argues Barbara Bodine, the U.S. ambassador in Yemen from 1997 to 2001. "Saudis and Yemenis are no more interchangeable than French and the Swiss, possibly less. Common language and common border do not equate to common culture."
The past success of the Saudi program, says Bodine, was mainly due to lavish incentives – houses, cars, arranged marriages – and threats to comply or risk consequences to their family. "It is doubtful the Saudis would want to provide that level of incentive to Yemenis, and how useful are they if the Yemenis are to return home?"
There is no doubt Obama's effort to mend relations between the U.S. and the greater Muslim community have had an impact. But there is a time limit to that goodwill, and in Yemen the fate of the Guantanamo prisoners is critical.
Hamdan is not among the optimists who believe Obama is dramatically different from his predecessor. "Every day, every day, they say he can't do something," he says sipping coffee on the rooftop terrace of the Burj Al Salam hotel, as the muezzins' cries from the city's dozens of mosques reverberate in a cacophony below.
When asked if he believes Guantanamo will close its doors by the deadline of Jan. 22, 2010, and if dozens of his former cellmates will be repatriated, Hamdan pauses before answering.
"Inshallah."
Toronto Star
