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A former drive of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, has claimed that he was sexually humiliated and groped by a touchy-feely female interrogator at the Guantanamo Bay prison. According to the New York Post, a lawyer representing Salim Ahmed Hamdan, said the woman put her hand on his thigh and behaved in an "improper" way that made him uncomfortable as a Muslim. "She came very close with her whole body toward me," he testified through an interpreter. "I couldn't do anything." Hamdan, a 37-year-old Yemeni, became visibly disturbed when his lawyer asked him about the female interrogator. He refused...

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, July 15 --Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the alleged al-Qaeda driver who faces an historic military trial next week, testified Tuesday that a female interrogator elicited information from him using sexually suggestive behavior that was offensive to him. Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, told a military court conducting a pretrial hearing that during questioning in 2002 a woman interrogator "came close to me, she came very close, with her whole body towards me. I couldn't do anything. I was afraid of the soldiers.'' "Did she touch your thigh?," asked Hamdan's lawyer, Charles Swift. "Yes...I said to...

In the aftermath of the bulldozer attack in downtown Jerusalem, Zuhier Hamdan, one of the mukhtars of the Jerusalem Arab village of Sur Bahir, home to the terrorist, was widely interviewed in the press. As reporters asked Hamdan for his reaction to the attack, I was reminded of the interview I conducted five years ago with the Israel-friendly village leader.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- Osama bin Laden's former driver may not go on trial this summer at Guantanamo after all. The military lawyer for Salim Hamdan says the Supreme Court ruling on the rights of Guantanamo prisoners is likely to at least delay the Yemeni's war crimes trial. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer told The Associated Press he will file a motion to dismiss the war crimes charges against Hamdan based on the court's finding that Guantanamo prisoners have constitutional rights. The defense lawyer said Wednesday he will argue that Hamdan was denied his constitutional right to a speedy...

Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense. But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Hamdan, already the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, has essentially been driven insane by solitary confinement in a tiny cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks,...

US military kills al-Qaida leader By PATRICK QUINN, Associate Press Writer BAGHDAD - A U.S. military helicopter fired a guided missile to kill a wanted al-Qaida in Iraq leader from Saudi Arabia who was responsible for the bombing deaths of five American soldiers, a spokesman said Sunday. U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith said Jar Allah, also known as Abu Yasir al-Saudi, and another Saudi known only as Hamdan, were both killed Wednesday in Mosul. According to the military, al-Saudi conducted numerous attacks against Iraqi and U.S. forces, including a Jan. 28 bomb attack that killed the five U.S. soldiers....

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Military judges dismissed charges Monday against a Guantanamo detainee accused of chauffeuring Osama bin Laden and another who allegedly killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan , throwing up roadblocks to the Bush administration‘s attempt to try terror suspects in military courts. Hamdan is "not subject to this commission" under legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Bush last year, said Navy Capt. Keith Allred, Hamdan‘s military judge, Monday evening. Hamdan is accused of chauffeuring bin Laden and being the al-Qaida chief‘s bodyguard. The new Military Commissions Act, written to establish military trials after...

The U.S. military prepared new charges Friday against three of the best-known detainees at Guantanamo Bay — a key step toward resuming the military tribunals for terrorism suspects that were halted by the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Authorities drafted new charges — including murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism — against Canadian Omar Khadr, Australian David Hicks and Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, said Air Force Col. Morris Davis, chief prosecutor in the Guantanamo war crimes trials. Under military rules, the charges are not considered formally filed against the detainees until they are approved by a U.S....

The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military, The Miami Herald reported Sunday. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, will retire in March or April under the military's "up or out" promotion system. Swift said last week he was notified he would not be promoted to commander. He said the notification came about two weeks after the Supreme Court sided with him and against the White House in the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a...

The recent Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in a feat of tortuous logic and ignoring the Political Question Doctrine, has created Geneva Convention protections for international terrorists, something few students of international humanitarian law anticipated, certainly few in uniform ever contemplated. This has detrimental and broad implication for the specific applicability of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the two “Protocols Additional of 1977” as they relate not only to the protection of combatants and terrorists, as appears to be the focus of current national debate, but more importantly to the protection and safeguarding of civilians, indeed to the...

FBI agents yesterday raided the suburban Detroit headquarters of LIFE for Relief and Development (LRD), the largest Islamic charity in the country. I first wrote about the group for The Post in 2003. Back then, FBI Director Robert Mueller was set to give an award to Imad Hamad, who heads the Midwest chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). But, after my Post article pointed out that Hamad was a subject in over a dozen terrorism-related investigations, the FBI revoked the award. One of those investigations concerned Hamad's close ties to LRD. Both the FBI and the then-U.S. Customs...

No one dedicated to federalist principles and the rule of law (least of all, political conservatives) should yield to the temptation to elevate short-term political objectives over concern for the preservation of timeless Constitutional principles. Unfortunately, in the debate on military tribunals, this is precisely what has happened. Some commentators, seeking to champion the Administration’s military tribunal bill, have, in my view, abandoned principle for expediency, and have additionally introduced a tone into the debate that has no place therein. For example, in a recent National Review Online article urging enactment of the President’s bill, Andrew McCarthy, a former federal...

Mosad fails to kill Hamas chief in Syria: sources GAZA, Aug. 16 (Xinhua) -- The external Israeli security intelligence service, better know as Mosad, has failed to assassinate Damascus-based Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal, sources in the movement revealed Wednesday. The sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, were quoted bya Palestinian independent news agency as saying that the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) knew about the Israeli attempt to kill Meshaal through a Western intelligence security service. They added that several Mosad agents arrived in Damascus in mid-July during the Israeli military offensives on Lebanon, disguising as foreign relief volunteers...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A federal appeals court on Monday rejected a government request to deny the release of a top fundraiser for an Islamic charity that authorities say has ties to terrorism, his attorneys said. The move by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco came days after a federal district judge ordered the release of Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, 45. Hamdan was to be released Monday evening, said Ranjana Natajaran of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. Hamdan has been held at the Terminal Island federal detention facility in San Pedro for more than two...

A federal judge has ordered that a top fundraiser for an Islamic charity the government says has ties to terrorism be released from detention, his attorney said Thursday. Abdel-Jabbar Hamdan, who has been held for two years, was ordered released without bond, according to his attorney, Ranjana Natarajan of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "We're thrilled, we're just thrilled," Natarajan said. The order was entered Thursday by U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter. "It is ordered that judgment be entered granting the Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus filed herein and ordering respondents to release petitioner forthwith on...

Everyone knows that Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was the blockbuster case of the latest Supreme Court term. What everyone doesn’t know — even most of the decision’s critics — is that Justice John Paul Stevens’s majority opinion in the case is partly based on simple factual mistakes. Hamdan concerned the treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. To reach a judgment, the Court had to decide first whether Congress, when it passed the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, had removed the case from the Court’s jurisdiction. To be precise, the Court had to determine whether a Graham-Kyl amendment to the...

Who could have guessed that Osama bin Laden's driver/bodyguard would be one of the privileged few to be granted a hearing by the high and mighty U.S. Supreme Court justices! After refusing to hear appeals from thousands of Americans during the past year, the Court's liberals jumped at a chance to rule that President Bush was wrong. It wasn't compassion for Gitmo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan. It was that Hamdan v. Rumsfeld offered an opportunity to proclaim judicial supremacy over both the other two branches of government and to slap the Bush Administration in the process. The Supreme Court had...

THE WEST WON'T WIN, AND HERE’S WHY Read your response to the Supreme Court Hamdan decision with interest. Unlike you I concluded some time ago that the West won’t win, and here’s why. A few years ago I did a Master’s of Military Studies at the Australian equivalent of the US War College. Our first assignment in Strategic Studies was on the elements of national power. This theory posits that each country draws its strength from a number of discrete elements that combine to create a nation’s power. The elements should combine to create a synergy where the total is...

House Republicans signaled a coming clash with the Senate over the future of military tribunals yesterday when Armed Service Committee members indicated they were inclined to give the Bush administration largely what it wants in the conduct of terrorism trials. The tone at the first House hearing since the Supreme Court tossed out President Bush's tribunals last month was markedly different from Tuesday's Senate hearing, where lawmakers from both parties said they wanted to make significant changes to the White House's plans. "This could be easy," said Rep. Candice S. Miller (R-Mich.), who proudly announced she has neither a law...

In recently striking down military commissions, the Supreme Court has given Congress a golden opportunity to resolve once and for all how enemies captured in the war on terror should be processed. Despite the various claims made about the breadth of the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, the court ruled narrowly that the current military commissions failed to comply with a statutory requirement mandating — absent a showing of impracticability — that their rules and procedures must be the same as those in regular courts martial. In fact, there are compelling practical and principled reasons for not running the courts martial...