GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (pro-terrorist CNN) — Osama bin Laden’s former driver Thursday was sentenced to 66 months in prison following his conviction on charges of providing material support to al Qaeda.

Salim Hamdan, who has been imprisoned at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay since 2002, has already been credited with five years served.

Hamdan was found guilty Wednesday of receiving weapons training and transporting and delivering arms. A jury of six military officers rejected charges that he conspired with others to carry out al Qaeda attacks.

Earlier Thursday, during his sentencing hearing, Hamdan told a military court that he never suspected bin Laden was a terrorist until after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Prosecutors weren’t buying his story and recommended he be sent to prison for 30 years to life.

Hamdan, speaking through a translator, gave the unsworn testimony one day after six officers convicted him of providing material support to al Qaeda but cleared him of terrorism conspiracy charges.

Hamdan tried to make the case to jurors that he was only a lowly driver, and described his relationship with bin Laden as "normal." He said he treated bin Laden as an employee would treat a boss and, in turn, bin Laden treated him in a way that took into account his position.

"I respected him, and he respected me," Hamdan said. "I regarded him, and he regarded me."

He was taken into custody in southern Afghanistan in November 2001. Though the car he was driving contained missiles, he has said all along that the car was borrowed and the missiles weren’t his. He repeated his assertions Thursday.

Hamdan testified he had wanted to settle in his native country, Yemen, but after the 2000 attack by an explosives-laden motorboat on the USS Cole in Yemen’s Gulf of Aden, which killed 17 American sailors, he and his wife left the country on a pilgrimage.

Hamdan said Yemeni media were blaming the attack on the Israeli Mossad, and he didn’t know until later that al Qaeda was behind it.

He also said he was "shocked" to hear that al Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

"It was impossible in my mind that Osama bin Laden would be behind it," said Hamdan, who was still working for him at the time.

"My view and my thinking had changed completely. It was a big shock for me when someone had treated you with respect and regard, and then you realize what they were up to," he said.

When the U.S.-led war began in Afghanistan after 9/11 Hamdan said, he took his family to Pakistan for their safety, and he left them to return the borrowed car to its owner.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that Hamdan became a member of al Qaeda in 1996 and conspired with the group on terrorist attacks. They alleged that Hamdan overheard conversations about 9/11 and claimed to have other information showing he was part of bin Laden’s inner circle.

The defense contended Hamdan was a low-level driver who knew little about the workings of bin Laden’s al Qaeda network. They said he worked for wages, not to carry out war against America.

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Guilty as sin

The military tribunal verdict convicting Salim Hamdan of providing material support to terrorism was eminently just. The guy was, after all, Osama Bin Laden’s driver, and he was, after all, arrested with two surface-to-air missiles in the back of his car.

And there was, after all, the video of a 1998 Al Qaeda news conference for Pakistani journalists that at one point showed Hamdan with a machine gun and at another juncture captured him smiling at Bin Laden.

And there were, after all, the undisputed facts that Hamdan fell in with Bin Laden in 1996 and worked with him through 9/11 as terror plot after terror plot unfolded. However low he may have been on the terror food chain, Hamdan abetted the murders of 2,751 people here in New York City.

No part in such a heinous crime against humanity can be dismissed as small enough to excuse. The jury was dead-on in refusing to let Hamdan off as the hapless, ill-educated flunky portrayed by his defense lawyers, and it was equally right in recognizing that he was not an Al Qaeda mastermind.

Hamdan was the first Guantanamo detainee to be tried for war crimes. Throughout the proceedings, the beyond-question certainty of his guilt was overshadowed by claims that the U.S. government had run roughshod over his legal and human rights. His lawyers succeeded brilliantly in putting the military tribunal system itself on trial.

But the facts are that the courts – up to the U.S. Supreme Court – the Congress and the President of the United States all weighed what protections America owed to this fourth-grade-educated Yemeni, who was captured in the Afghanistan war zone a couple of months after 9/11.

Hamdan’s lawyers will be filing more appeals, up through the military courts and through a high-level federal appeals panel and to the Supreme Court as they pursue the insane, dangerous notion that the U.S. must give enemy combatants every right that’s due citizens under the Constitution.

Among the knocks on the military tribunal system are that it is freer to accept hearsay testimony than civilian courts are, that some evidence can be kept from view as classified and that the government can try to introduce statements made under coercion. Miranda rights do not apply.

But, as conducted, Hamdan’s trial, the first U.S. military commission war trial since World War II, was more than fair.

He was ably represented, and the judge barred the use of admissions that were drawn from him under the roughest circumstances.

What remained was the testimony of 14 prosecution witnesses, who hanged Hamdan with his own words. There was, for example, the testimony of FBI Agent Ali Soufan, who questioned him about the events of 9/11 as they transpired in Afghanistan.