Capturing Bin Laden On Camera

John Miller, then with ABC, interviews Osama bin Laden in 1998. He spoke about the experience yesterday at the trial of bin Laden's former driver. (Abc News)

The ABC crew was taken to a small hut atop another hill. "This is probably not what you are used to in terms of accommodations, but around here it's the Ritz," Miller quoted Zawahiri as saying.

"You will be comfortable here. You are not prisoners. You are our guests," the al-Qaeda deputy continued.

They just couldn't leave the hut.

Thus began a days-long ritual in which Miller submitted 16 written questions on a yellow legal pad and asked each day when the interview would take place.

The green light came on May 28.

After being thoroughly searched, their pencils and pens confiscated, the men were loaded into the blue pickup and driven through a series of checkpoints, where the masked men emerged and opened fire.

Apparently, the al-Qaeda bureaucracy hadn't gotten word of the interview.

Finally, they came to a hilltop camp in southern Afghanistan, greeted by hundreds more masked men who fired into the air when bin Laden arrived with a phalanx of bodyguards.

The al-Qaeda boss would speak, but his answers would not be translated into English, Zawahiri told Miller. "I said, 'That's going to be a problem -- how will I ask a follow-up question?' " Miller said he told Zawahiri.

"He said it won't be a problem. There will be no follow-up questions."

There would also be no footage of the camp. "Dr. Zawahiri explained that 'this is not like your Sam Donaldson walking through the Rose Garden of the White House with the president,' " Miller told the jury. "Mr. bin Laden was a very important man."

The interview itself, in which bin Laden predicted "a black future for America" (two U.S. embassies in East Africa would blow up three months later), was almost anticlimactic to Miller's testimony.

The drama aside, it was also uncertain what purpose the testimony bore to the case against Hamdan, who faces up to life in prison if convicted. Defense lawyers say he was a minor chauffeur uninvolved in terrorism.

Prosecutors, who say Hamdan ferried weapons for al-Qaeda, called Miller to the stand amid other evidence about al-Qaeda's history and ideology.

Though federal agents have testified that Hamdan told them that he drove bin Laden to other media events, Miller acknowledged out of the jury's presence that he couldn't identify Hamdan.

The defense was unimpressed. "I thought it was an interesting human story," said Michael Berrigan, the deputy chief defense counsel. "But I don't recall any connection to Mr. Hamdan."

As for Miller, he left the stand and flew back to his FBI job in Washington. It was time to go back to speaking out against terrorists, not speaking to them.