Opening statements got under way at Guantanamo Bay on Tuesday for the first U.S. military commissioned war-crimes trial since World War II.
A U.S. Naval prosecutor told a military jury at the Guantánamo Bay detention center that Salim Ahmed Hamden -- Osama bin Laden's former driver -- "provided material support" for al-Qaida, was an arms runner and a bodyguard for the terror organization.
If convicted, the Yemeni national faces a life sentence. If found not guilty, he faces a lifetime behind bars along with the 260 other so-called enemy combatants being held at the U.S. Naval facility in Cuba.
That's because the Bush administration has declared Hamden and the other captives "enemy combatants." According to the administration, they can be held until the end of the war on terror.
The combatants do have a sliver of hope, albeit a thin one.
Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former body guard, is on trial for war crimes while being detained at Guantanamo Bay. Hamdan, in this undated photo, faces a lifetime behind bars even if he's found not guilty.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month that the enemy combatants, including Hamden, had a right to challenge their detentions in U.S. civil courts under what is known as habeas corpus -- an undefined process as applied to the detainees but one routinely used by U.S. inmates challenging their convictions.
"The Supreme Court left many significant questions open," Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Monday as he urged Congress to adopt protocols for the detainees to challenge their detentions in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
The attorney general said it was "well within the historic role and competence of Congress and the executive branch to attempt to resolve" those open questions.
Generally, federal judges routinely deny habeas corpus petitions. They idle for years and sometimes decades.
In California alone, there are more than 100 such petitions from death row inmates pending because of a shortage of judges and a lack of will to resolve them.
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