"There is No Such Thing as Justice Here": Hamdan Trial Begins

Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's personal driver, will enter a specially built courtroom in Guantanamo Bay [Monday] for the first full trial of any of the hundreds of detainees to have been sent to America's infamous prison camp since the 9/11 attacks nearly seven years ago.

Instead of one of al-Qa'ida's top leaders in captivity -- such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- the accused in the first U.S. military tribunal since the Second World War is a 39-year-old Yemeni, whose lawyers say he belongs on a psychiatric ward rather than in jail. Heightening the irony, a military judge has overruled prosecutors and decided that Hamdan's lawyers can question the alleged mastermind of the September 2001 attacks and other possible witnesses about the driver. The judge threatened to delay the trial if prosecutors did not arrange this over the weekend.

Even the U.S. does not claim that the driver and sometime mechanic, who earned a mere $200 (£100) a month, was a major terror figure. But prosecutors allege that he carried weapons used by al-Qai'da and helped to spirit Bin Laden out of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. If convicted, he could find himself in prison for life.

For many, however, it is the erosion of America's historic liberties that will be on trial. The Bush administration created a system of detention without due process when it set up the Guantanamo prison camp in 2002, a legal limbo in which hundreds of detainees -- including Hamdan, according to his lawyers -- have suffered psychological and possibly physical torture. The driver is alleged to have gone mad as a direct result of being kept in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day in a tiny cell; he is hardly the ideal subject for the first major test of President George Bush's much-criticized system of military commissions to bring terrorism suspects to justice.

Hamdan left his home in Yemen in 1996 and tried to sign on as an Islamist fighter in Tajikistan, but could not get into the country. The U.S. says he went to Afghanistan instead, and ended up working for Bin Laden. After the terror attacks on New York and Washington, Hamdan drove al-Qa'ida's supreme leader between safe houses to avoid U.S. missiles, according to prosecutors, who say he broke away a month later and evacuated his daughter and pregnant wife from Kandahar in the midst of the invasion.

It is not only Hamdan's future that will be determined by the trial. There is great concern among members of the Bush administration that they too could find themselves before foreign or international courts for the role they played in facilitating and encouraging the torture of detainees.

The infamous "torture memos" circulated by Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, (David) Addington, and two former administration figures, Douglas Feith and Alberto Gonzales, covertly approved the abuse of prisoners by the CIA. These men were publicly warned recently by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when Powell was Secretary of State, to "never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia or Israel".

One of the most explosive parts of the trial could be the efforts by the defense to show in coming weeks that Pentagon officials interfered with military prosecutors and pressed cases for strictly political reasons. Hearings on that issue are expected to reveal how White House officials and aides of Cheney were on the phone to Guantanamo -- in a way, some claim, that made a mockery of American military justice. The former chief Guantanamo prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis, a harsh critic of the way the war crimes tribunal system is run, could even testify for Hamdan.

Since the U.S. designated its naval base at the tip of Cuba as a place to imprison some of its greatest enemies, about 800 people have been held at Guantanamo, and some 420 have been released back to their countries without charge. The oldest known suspect imprisoned there was 95-year-old Mohammed Sadiq from Afghanistan, who has been released. The youngest is Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was just 16 years old when he was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2002.