NEWS_ARTICLE.RttP{Bin Laden driver says sorry for US victims}

Osama bin Laden's driver apologized on Thursday in a sentencing hearing in a U.S. war crimes court at Guantanamo for any pain his services to al Qaeda caused its U.S. victims.

"I don't know what could be given or presented to these innocent people who were killed in the U.S.," 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 U.S. war crimes tribunal since the aftermath of World War Two.

A forensic psychiatrist who interviewed the Yemeni captive behind the razor wire at the U.S. naval base in Cuba reported that Hamdan wept when he first saw videotape of planes crashing into the World Trade Towers in the September 11 attacks, and that he prayed for the victims.

Prosecutor John Murphy 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," Murphy said. "His penalty should be so significant that it forecloses any possibility that he reestablishes his ties with terrorists."

Defense lawyer Charles Swift said Hamdan deserved a sentence of less than four years because his cooperation with U.S. intelligence services more than outweighed his culpability as a member of bin Laden's motor pool in Afghanistan.

SIMPLE BEDOUIN

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."

The six jurors, whose names are secret, convicted Hamdan on Wednesday 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 can sentence Hamdan, who is about 40, to life in prison, no punishment or anything in between. He will get credit for at least some of the six years he has been held at Guantanamo.

Swift reminded the jurors that they acquitted Hamdan of joining al Qaeda's murderous conspiracies and said harsh punishment should be reserved for those who planned them.

"At some point we will bring the people who planned, the people who conspired, the people who brought these buildings down," he said. "The victims of 9/11 and other places will receive their justice and it will be all the more meaningful because we caught the guys who did it, not their driver."

Hamdan said he was stunned to learn his boss was behind the bombing of the USS Cole warship 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 U.S. 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."