GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Al Qaeda's top terrorists were gifted linguists with college degrees recruited from Osama bin Laden's training camps, a select cadre, who could not include a Yemeni with a fourth-grade education plucked from the motor pool, a defense witness testified Wednesday.

''I don't see Salim Hamdan by any stretch of the imagination fitting this profile,'' said Brian Glyn Williams, in a live video link from the U.S. air base at Incirlik, Turkey.

Lawyers for Hamdan, 37, accused of conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for terror, called Williams as a court-approved expert on jihad warriors in Central Asia. He has done field research with warlords in Afghanistan and captives there and in Pakistan to develop a profile of the different grades of Muslim warriors for Allah.

''The terrorists, they are the elite. I call them the Harvard of the terrorist movement,'' said Williams, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth.

They are ''multilingual, adept at infiltration, very, very talented operatives,'' who can blend into the West.

''They weren't run-of-the-mill riff-raff, the sort of cannon fodder that al Qaeda would use in military operations against the Northern Alliance,'' he said.

For more than a week the Pentagon prosecution at the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II has cast Hamdan, a $200-a-month driver, as a trusted bin Laden aide.

WEAPONS COURIER

At interrogation, FBI agents testified, Hamdan told of his skill at maneuvering in motorcades to help the boss elude U.S. reprisal.

He described overhearing bin Laden and fellow plotters analyze the 9/11 attacks, after the fact. He also served, at times, as a bodyguard and weapons courier, agents said.

Starting Wednesday, the defense sought to portray Hamdan to the jury of six U.S. military officers as something less than a sidekick -- a man who drove the Saudi millionaire for wages, not ideology.

Last week, prosecutors admitted as evidence a photo of Hamdan at a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, shouldering an assault rifle.

Also in the picture: bin Laden and a head of the al Qaeda godfather's bodyguard team.

On Wednesday, the defense team introduced its expert by putting a photo of Williams holding an AK-47 assault rifle as he traveled with U.S.-allied, Northern Alliance fighters.

Williams then testified that weapons are commonplace in tribal Afghanistan, where, he said, he was urged to carry one for personal protection while conducting research.

HEADACHE

Also, Hamdan skipped part of the trial, for a second time. Last week, he left while jurors watched a video of his first battlefield interrogation.

Wednesday the judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, told the jury that Hamdan ``has a headache, was given Tylenol and is resting. Please don't hold this against him if he comes in and sits down to rejoin us.''

Hamdan's head ached on the eighth day of trial, as the defense started presenting its case.

Prosecutors called 13 witnesses. They included nine federal agents who related his interrogations from Afghanistan to Guantánamo and two Special Forces soldiers who were in the vicinity of his November 2001 capture in southern Afghanistan, when two surface-to-air missiles were found in his car.

The Pentagon also called a counterterror consultant it paid $45,000 to testify and make a movie about al Qaeda, as well as a former ABC reporter who interviewed bin Laden in 1998.

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