World News

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Al-Qaida kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed testified at the U.S. war crimes court Friday as "executive director of 9-11" and dismissed Osama bin Laden's driver as a primitive pleasure-seeker unqualified to plot or carry out terror.

"He was not fit to plan or execute," said Mohammed, blamed for the mass murder of 2,973 people on Sept. 11, 2001. "He is fit to change trucks' tires, change oil filters, wash and clean cars."

And with that endorsement, submitted in written testimony, the defense rested in the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 37, of Yemen, the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.

The jury of six military officers is scheduled to start deliberating on a verdict Monday, after lawyers give closing arguments.

Defense lawyers had argued for months for access to the confessed architect of the Sept. 11 terror attacks to dispute the Pentagon's charge that Hamdan was an al-Qaida insider, not just a driver but a sometime bodyguard and weapons courier responsible for international terror.

And the man whom President Bush called "KSM" both disappointed and delivered.

Mohammed declined to testify live, and defense lawyer Harry Schneider said he saw no point in having guards drag the man whom the CIA waterboarded to court.

So the jury was left to read his testimony. For 30 hushed minutes an Apache helicopter pilot and a Navy captain sat in the jury box studying KSM's answers with four fellow senior U.S. military officers.

In his reply to defense attorney's questions, Mohammed not only claimed credit for the 9-11 attacks — likely fodder for his future death penalty trial — but he also ridiculed the U.S. portrayals of al-Qaida and trivialized the first war on terror captive to face American military commission justice.

"He was only searching for pleasure and money in this life," Mohammed said of Hamdan, who earned $200 a month — a fortune for an orphaned Yemeni with a fourth-grade education.

It takes two-thirds of the jury votes to convict Hamdan. They then would deliberate a penalty. Conviction can carry life in prison.

Mohammed and four other alleged 9-11 plotters were charged June 5. Their conviction at a future commission could bring military execution.

"I personally was the executive director of 9-11," Mohammed wrote. "Hamdan had no previous knowledge of the operation, or any other one."

Hamdan has no ideology, he added. "His nature was more primitive."

Case prosecutors did not comment on the testimony, as has been their practice. They will likely respond in closing arguments, which start Monday morning.

Judge Keith Allred, a Navy captain, gave jurors the weekend off while he writes instructions on how to apply the law to the evidence.

Then it will be up to the jurors, called commissioners, to sift through the evidence and law to decide whether, as the defense contends, Hamdan was less than a sidekick in the shadow of the charismatic bin Laden.

Or if the Pentagon prosecutor is right in portraying the Yemeni, who looks somber around the jury but grins at Allred, as a key cog in the international terror organization.

The presentation of evidence lasted two weeks. Everyone who testified but the two detainees were Americans.

Lawyers for Hamdan called eight witnesses, including Mohammed and alleged fellow 9-11 co-conspirator Walid bin Attash.

Also, two U.S. Special Forces officers gave testimony Thursday in Hamdan's defense that was deemed so sensitive the Pentagon invoked a national security privilege and cleared the public from the courtroom.

Both were at Bagram, Afghanistan, when Hamdan was brought there for interrogation in December 2001.

Prosecutors called 14 witnesses.

Ten were federal agents who described Hamdan's admissions across 15 months of interrogations from Afghanistan to Guantanamo. Those accounts of the driver's own words were the foundation of the Pentagon's case, which accuses the driver of conspiracy in al-Qaida attacks from 1998 and providing material support to terrorism.

The deputy chief defense counsel, Mike Berrigan, a retired judge advocate general, called the Hamdan trial "an obscenity."

Speaking to reporters, he said that Hamdan's lawyers were so hobbled by congressionally approved secrecy and government compartmentalization that "you haven't seen big chunks" of the evidence and testimony.

"It's not a day the administration should glory in," he said. "It's a day America should be ashamed of. Hopefully, in the not-too-distant future this process will go away. And we will see real trials."

Army Col. Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor, speaking in response to Berrigan, said, "It has been an open and fair and thorough process. I think it has gone extraordinarily well."