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november , . around noon. Checkpoints were common as potholes on the roads of Afghanistan. Salim Ahmed Salim Hamdan, driving north on Highway 4 in a Toyota hatchback, was not surprised to be stopped by a group of armed men as he approached the fortied town of Takht-e Pol. Afghanistan was at war. It had been at war for decades. On October 7, less than a month after terrorist attacks obliterated the Twin Towers in New York and destroyed part of the Pentagon in Washington, the United States had become the latest entrant in the Afghan wars. American air strikes and Special Forces backed a loose confederation of militias hostile to the ruling Taliban movement, but here, in Kandahar province, the Taliban still dominated. The city of Kandahar, according to legend founded by Alexander the Great, was the home of Mullah Mohammed Omar, a half-blind cleric who led the Taliban with the aid of Pakistani intelligence. Highway 4 ran southeast from Kandahar to the frontier, into the Pakistani province of Baluchistan and its capital, Quetta. In recent decades, Quetta had been transformed by an inux of Afghan refugees and the elements that inevitably accompanied them: arms dealers, drug smugglers, factional cadre, intelligence agents. The city, which sat just outside the war zone, was a haven for various parties with an interest in Afghanistan. As the American-led campaign turned toward Kandahar, more Afghans would set out along Highway 4 seeking safety in Quetta. But Hamdan was headed the other way: to Kandahar. And to his apparent surprise, the ghters at the checkpoint werent Taliban but part of the enemy Pashtun militia. Hours before, American air strikes had blasted out Takht-e Pols Taliban defenders, allowing ghters from the eight-hundred-man militia under the warlord Gul Sharzai to enter the town without ring a shot.1 These ghters, nominally 1

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loyal to the former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, were clandestinely obliged to the Central Intelligence Agency.2 Sharzais men had set up highway roadblocks north and south of Takht-e Pol, which would serve as a staging ground for a coming assault on Kandahar, after another American-paid Pashtun militia this one headed by Hamid Karzaiarrived from the north. Trac had been slight. Earlier, a white van had tried to blow past the checkpoint, prompting a shootout that left two Egyptian occupants dead and a third man captured, a Moroccan whose name would turn out to be Said Boujaadia.3 Hamdan was not so bold. He tried to ee, but the Afghans nabbed him and immediately identied him as an Arab. He was being dragged away to an uncertain fate when the American ocer managing the Sharzai operation, Major Hank Smith, showed up to see what the shooting was about. The Pashtuns pointed to two SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missiles in battered, olive-drab carrying tubes. They said the missiles had been taken from the Arabs car. With barely a dozen Americans on handsoldiers and CIA Smith hardly was equipped to deal with enemy prisoners of war. Still, Afghan militias were even less inclined to take prisoners, and summary execution of captured enemies was not unknown as a local tradition. Smith had his American soldiers take Hamdan and Boujaadia, hooded and bound, to a nearby shack. A search of the Toyota turned up two passports, Yemen Airways tickets for Hamdan and a woman named Fatima, a handheld radio, brevity codesa form of radio shorthandand a folder with newspaper and magazine articles about al Qaeda. Plenty of cash was found $1,900, plus about $260 in Pakistani rupees. There was a passport photo envelope from Razis Portrait Inn Studio and Express Lab, located in Unit 44 of the Shalimar Shopping Center in Karachi, Pakistan. There were ve photos of a baby girl. And there were letters. One, handwritten in Arabic on a page ripped from a small spiralbound notebook, was addressed to Brother Saqr. I hope you and all the brothers with you are well, it read. If

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possible, please send me 25 to 30 original Russian Pikkaa type of machine gunbelts. Likewise, if you can nd Pikka magazines. Most of the Pikkas we have do not have them and we are in urgent need of them. Even Grenavanother Soviet-made weaponmagazines will work. We cut them o and adapt them for the Pikka in the workshop. Please do whatever you can. Your brother, Khallad. P.S. Can you nd three military compasses for us? They said there are a lot of them in Kabul.4 Major Smith looked at the SA-7s, now sitting on the tailgate of a blue pickup. By themselves, they were inoperable. No launchers or ring mechanisms had been found. The Taliban had no air force. The only planes in the sky, the only possible target for a surface-to-air missilethe sort of weapon that in the 1980s, when supplied by Washington to the mujahideen, had proved so devastating to the Soviet militarywas the American-led coalition air forces. After photographing the missiles to include in a future report, Smith ordered them destroyed. Not so Hamdans car. He axed an orange insignia to the hood, the signal to coalition air forces that the vehicle was friendly, and gave the car to one of his local interpreters. Smith considered it a form of recycling.5 Small and swarthy, Hamdan sat on the dirt oor of a mud hut, his hands bound before him in exicus. With a video camera running, a masked US Army interrogator questioned him in Arabic. An armed guard stood behind the prisoner, remaining silent as the interrogator struggled to make himself understood through his heavy American accent. Hamdan spoke rapidly, his eyes bright, his smile and occasional nervous laugh suggesting he knew his number was up. He said he had come to Afghanistan as a relief worker for al Wafa, an Islamic charity. But with the recent ghting, he had borrowed a car to take his wife and daughter to safety in Pakistan. The car wasnt hishe had borrowed it from somebody named Abu Yasserand neither were most of the items found in it. Sure, he knew there were SA-7s in the trunk,

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he said, but they must have belonged to Abu Yasser. Yes, he had heard of al Qaeda, but he knew little about it. I heard that they train people who come to Afghanistan for training, he said. Perhaps he didnt expect ever to leave that hut. I am not lying to you, he said. Its all nished for me, why should I lie? years later, from a cell at Guantanamo Bay, Hamdan recalled the events somewhat dierently. He had been working in Kabul when the ghting began in October 2001, and feared for his wife and daughter in Kandahar. So he asked his boss, Osama bin Laden, for permission to go to them. I decided to borrow a car to drive my family to Pakistan, he said.6 After depositing them near the border, I tried to return to Afghanistan to return the car to its owner, and to sell his belongings to raise enough money to get the family back to Yemen. But he was stopped by Afghans looking for Arabs to sell to American forces. When they stopped me, they had already taken another Arab who they shot and killed. I tried to ee, but I failed and they captured me again. They tied my hands and feet behind me like an animal with electrical wire . . . so tight that the wire cut me. He was taken to a house and then moved to another, for seven days, where I was questioned by a man in a military uniform who spoke Arabic and said he was an American. The Afghan soldiers told me they had gotten $5,000 from the Americans for me, Hamdan said. He said he saw the money himself. According to the account dictated from his jail cell in 2004, Salim Hamdan was born in 1969, perhaps, in the rural village of Khoreiba in the southeastern Yemeni region of Hadhramout. That was two years after the British pulled out of the country, which they had ruled as the protectorate of Aden. The newly independent state, following then-fashionable ideological fads, proclaimed itself the Peoples Republic of South Yemen and later the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen, a minor satellite in the Soviet orbit. In contrast, the adjacent Yemen Arab Republic, better known as North Yemen, independent since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World

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War I, tilted more toward the West, despite its squabbles with adjacent Saudi Arabia. The rival Yemens, among the poorest countries in the Arab world, fought occasional battles that commanded little attention outside the region, until in 1990, in an equally overlooked event, the two states merged. It was unclear what impact these political developments had on Salim Hamdan. Orphaned as a child, educated perhaps to a fourthgrade level, he spent the 1980s living with relatives in the port city of Mukalla, working odd jobs. At age twenty, he drifted westward to the newly unied Yemens capital, Sana, to seek better employment opportunities, he said. He drove a dabbab, a type of jitney, but fortune passed him by until 1996, when he met a man seeking recruits to aid Muslims struggling against the communists in Tajikistan, he said. That former Soviet republic, on Afghanistans northern border, was the next target for the international Islamic fundamentalist movement that had toppled the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul. Traveling to Afghanistan via Pakistan, Hamdan proved less than a relentless mujahid for the Tajik struggle. I met with other Muslims who were going to Tajikistan, he recounted. We traveled by plane, then by car and then by foot until we got to Badashaw, on the Tajik border. But the forces at Tajikistan wouldnt allow us to go further, and the weather in the mountains was bad. Rather than battle the elements or the border guards, we turned around and left for Kabul. Hamdan said he just wanted to go home to Yemen, but a comrade named Muhammad reminded him there was no work to be found there. Besides, there was a better opportunity. Muhammad had gotten a lead on a suitable job for Hamdan. He took me to a farm in Jalalabad, where I met Osama bin Laden, Hamdan said. The emir oered me a job as a driver on a farm he owned, bringing Afghan workers from the local village to work and back again. As the year passed, Hamdan gained bin Ladens condence. He began to have me drive him to various places, Hamdan said. Bin Ladens family also came from Hadhramouthis father Mohammed was born therewhich perhaps explains the austere ide-

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ologues anity toward his barely literate driver.7 Soon, bin Laden was functioning as a surrogate father, even arranging for Hamdans marriage. Bin Laden sent Hamdan and another courtier recruited from the Tajik expedition, Nasser al-Bahri, to Yemen to marry sisters. Al-Bahri, a Saudi who adopted the nom de guerre Abu Jandal, had become one of bin Ladens chief bodyguards. He now was also brother-in-law to Hamdan, who would himself take an al Qaeda name of Saqr al Jeddawi, the Hawk of Jeddah. hamdans resistance training proved somewhat decient. After capture at the checkpoint, Hamdan later recounted, I helped and cooperated with the Americans in every way, even thoughor perhaps becausethey physically abused him. When I took them to the places I had driven Osama bin Laden, they would threaten me with death, torture or prison when I did not know the answers to their questions. One of their methods to threaten was to put a pistol on the table in front of me and ask, What do you think? Within weeks of September 11, the United States had orchestrated regime change in Afghanistan. Directed by intelligence units like the one Major Smith commanded and backed by coalition air power, the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban militias pushed out the black-turbaned Islamist foe. Prisoners, by the hundreds, were a dividend of this surprisingly rapid success. With US forces oering bounties for al Qaeda ghters, typically ve thousand dollars or so, Afghan tribesmen turned over hundreds more, assuring the Americans that the prisoners were terrorists. The US commander, General Tommy Franks, didnt want the small number of ground troops he had in Afghanistan tied up guarding enemy prisoners. That suited the Bush administration. It had developed plans to build a special kind of detention center in the Pentagons own time zone, at the US naval base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A new enemy would face a special kind of reckoning, trial by military commission, that could see prisoners prosecuted, convicted, and executed at President George W. Bushs command. Ocials called it

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rough justice. Guantanamo would be al Qaedas Nuremberg, the end of the line for perpetrators of monstrous crimes. Yet Guantanamo held no Mullah Omar, no Ayman al-Zawahiri, no Osama bin Laden. Al Qaedas high command somehow had evaded the campaign the Pentagon called Operation Enduring Freedom. A handful of real al Qaeda commanders would fall into American handsAbdelrahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh, and the terrorist entrepreneur who conceived the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Bush White House, however, would decide that these men were far too important to put on trial. They were sent instead to years of secret detention and sometimes brutal interrogation within a clandestine prison network the CIA operated overseas. Despite pledging to bring the 9/11 conspirators to justice, President Bush hid them from prosecutors and even the abbreviated trial process he had prescribed for the alien enemy. Pentagon prosecutors, ordered to create a justice system from scratch, scoured their prisoner lists for suitable defendants. Bin Laden had gotten away. But they had his driver.