Bin Laden Driver Gets 51/2 Years; U.S. Sought 30

"It was a big shock for me when someone who had treated you, or we had treated each other with respect and regard and cordially, and then you realize what they were up to," Hamdan said through an Arabic translator.

Still, he kept coming back to bin Laden. "I had no choice," he said.

Soon afterward, hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001 -- what Hamdan called "the incident here in the United States." He said he was captured in November 2001 after driving his wife to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Calling Hamdan "a hardened al-Qaeda member," Justice Department prosecutor John Murphy said: "Once you see your boss killing people, you leave. You get another job. "

Hamdan received a light sentence compared with those of others who have been convicted in U.S. courts of having connections to terrorism. Ali al-Timimi, a Muslim spiritual leader in Falls Church, received a life sentence in 2005 largely for inciting followers to train for jihad against the United States.

Edward B. MacMahon Jr., who represented Timimi at trial and defends detainees at Guantanamo, said the disparity highlights "rank injustice." "It says that we have two completely different justice systems that are beginning to mete out just obscenely different results," he said.

Charles Swift, an attorney for Hamdan, acknowledged that his client made "a series of bad decisions." But he urged the jurors to consider Hamdan's cooperation with U.S. interrogators and said Hamdan had only wanted to support his family. "Bin Laden paid 10 times what he could have earned" in another driving job, Swift said.

White reported from Washington.