KEY POINTS:
Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's personal driver, was to enter a specially built courtroom in Guantanamo Bay today 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 Qaeda's top leaders in captivity - such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the accused in the first United States military tribunal since World War II is a 39-year-old Yemeni, whose lawyers say belongs on a psychiatric ward rather than in jail.
Heightening the irony, a military judge has overruled prosecutors and decided 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.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin today. Military prosecutors are gathering 22 witnesses for a trial that is expected to last roughly three weeks.
Even the US does not say the driver and sometime mechanic, who earned a mere US$200 ($262.65) a month, was a major terror figure.
But prosecutors claim he carried weapons used by al Qaeda and helped to spirit bin Laden out of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taleban. 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 W. Bush's much-criticised system of military commissions to bring terrorism suspects to justice. Hamdan drove al Qaeda's supreme leader between safe houses to avoid US missiles, according to prosecutors,
One of the most explosive parts of the trial could be the efforts by the defence 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 Vice-President Dick 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.
As for Hamdan, he is "small fry, a grunt, and Bush knows it", said Marc Falkoff, a lawyer representing several other Yemeni detainees.
"But the Administration was never going to bring one of its high-profile detainees out first."
The military commissions were created to try people designated "unlawful enemy combatants" after the Supreme Court rebuked the Bush Administration in 2006 for ignoring the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war and denying the most basic right of habeas corpus to prisoners.
DOING TIME
* 800 people have been held at Guantanamo.
* 420 have been released without charge.
* 95 year-old Mohammed Sadiq from Afghanistan is the oldest person to have been held there.
* 16 year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was the youngest when first captured in Afghanistan in 2002.
* 20 Detainees are facing charges. Eighty are expected to be charged.
- INDEPENDENT, AP
