Al-Jazeera Cameraman Still at Guantanamo

"When you are targeted once, it could be a mistake," Andoni said in an interview from Amman, Jordan. "But when you are bombed twice, it's something else."

In an interview in Khartoum, Sudanese Justice Minister Mohamed Ali al-Mardi said the holding of the cameraman without charge "is repugnant to all the conventions and principles of international law."

Washington has given Sudan no information about al-Hajj, al-Mardi said. U.S. relations with Sudan are strained over the Darfur conflict.

Al-Hajj has been interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison complex, which sits on an arid corner of southeast Cuba overlooking the Caribbean.

"I consider the information that we obtained from him to be useful," Paul Rester, director of the Joint Intelligence Group at the prison, said in an interview at Guantanamo Bay. Rester refused to elaborate or even to comment on the allegations aired at the 2005 hearing.

International human rights and press freedom groups condemn al-Hajj's imprisonment. Reporters Without Borders cited his case when it dropped the United States nine places to 53rd in its 2006 Worldwide Press Freedom Index. The group also noted the case of AP photographer Bilal Hussein, detained by U.S. forces on April 12 in Ramadi, Iraq, and held without charge ever since.

Al-Hajj himself has protested by joining the hunger strike at Guantanamo, according to letters released by his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

"If justice is to be achieved, due sacrifice must be made," al-Hajj wrote.

It was not known whether al-Hajj was among the 11 prisoners that the military said were on hunger strike as of Thursday.

The U.S. military says that in the 1990s, al-Hajj was an executive assistant at a Qatar-based beverage company that provided support to Muslim fighters in Bosnia and Chechnya. The U.S. says he also traveled to Azerbaijan at least eight times to carry money on behalf of his employer to the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now defunct charity that authorities say funded militant groups.

It was also during this period that he allegedly "met" Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a senior lieutenant to Osama bin Laden who was arrested in Germany in 1998 and extradited to the United States.

Stafford Smith said al-Hajj did not routinely transport money but that he and his wife once carried $220,000 from Qatar to Azerbaijan for his boss at the beverage company _ and that he even declared the cash to customs.

"Sami was only doing what he was told by his boss," Stafford Smith said.

He said al-Hajj, while working for the beverage company, met Salim only once, when he was sent to pick him up at the airport in Qatar in 1998. During the drive, the two discussed schools and housing, the attorney said.

Al-Hajj, who has a wife and son in Qatar, will mark his fifth anniversary in Guantanamo in June. The military informed him in December that it had reviewed his case and determined he was not among the more than 80 detainees at Guantanamo Bay deemed eligible for release or transfer.

"You will continue to be kept at Guantanamo Bay for at least one more year," the military told al-Hajj in the formal notice.

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Ben Fox reported for this story from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Alfred de Montesquiou from Khartoum, Sudan.