Detainee driver slovenly, threatens boycott

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Osama bin Laden's driver appeared at his war crimes trial Monday looking disheveled and threatening a boycott.

Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 36, of Yemen filed a brief as far back as February protesting what they argue has been a protracted regime of virtual solitary confinement behind the detention center's barbed wire.

They argued that his mental health has deteriorated, and asked a Navy judge to intervene.

Prison camp spokesmen say there is no such thing as solitary confinement at Guantánamo. Detainees can see guards, get open-air recreation, shout to other detainees through slits in their cell doors through which food is delivered -- and sometimes see other captives coming and going through the slits, called ``bean holes.''

On Monday the judge postponed a hearing on the topic until the eve of his June trial. In response, the normally mild-mannered driver, a father of two with a fourth-grade education, looked stricken.

He then asked to be excused.

''I refuse all the lawyers. I refuse them working on my behalf and I'm sorry,'' Hamdan said. ``I don't allow them to represent me when I'm not here.''

Hamdan, facing life in prison on a charge of material support for terrorism, is the latest of a string of four war-on-terror detainees to seek to walk out on the proceedings.

He is accused of abetting a series of al Qaeda attacks around the globe, not by knowing about them or plotting them but by serving as bin Laden's $200-a-month driver and sometime bodyguard in Afghanistan leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In a twist, he said he was banning any participation by his five-lawyer defense team -- including his first attorney, a former Navy lawyer turned college professor who took the Hamdan case to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

It was uncertain whether Hamdan's boycott would hold. The judge called a recess to give the detainee a bathroom break, then extended it through the lunch hour.

The development was a surprise in a day that defense lawyers had predicted would go differently -- with testimony from the Pentagon's former chief prosecutor for Military Commissions, who resigned to protest what he described as trials rigged to win convictions.

Air Force Col. Morris Davis, the prosecutor who before he resigned filed charges against Hamdan, was outside the tribunal chamber when the captive broke from the script.

Hamdan rambled at times, saying his human rights had been abused, and in particular that ``my self-esteem . . .does not allow me to continue to speak.''

His appearance was striking. Throughout nearly four years at the defense table, he has consistently appeared elegantly groomed in traditional Yemeni garb -- a pristine white gown topped by a herring-bone jacket, a skullcap over tidy, short-cropped hair.

He would enter the court with a head scarf draped in traditional Yemeni style, then unfurl it over his shoulders as though removing his hat for the court.

Monday, as if to illustrate his attorneys' arguments that his mental health is deteriorating from five years behind the razor wire, he appeared slovenly -- in a rumpled tan, military-issue prison camp uniform.

He had long unkempt curly hair and a scraggly beard, and fidgeted with his headset through the preliminary proceedings.

The judge sounded sympathetic and politely asked Hamdan to take a seat after he stood up at the defense table -- bringing every guard in the room to his feet, on alert.

Detainees are routinely unshackled at the trials.

''I don't have control over the conditions of your confinement,'' said Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the trial judge. ``But your defense attorneys have asked me to look into the conditions of your confinement and grant you some relief.''

His trial has been a showcase for President Bush's military commissions. He was the first-ever charged when they opened in August 2004. He was among the first recharged after Congress authorized the trials following closure by the U.S. Supreme Court.

With delays in the trial of alleged child soldier Omar Khadr of Canada, Hamdan's is also slated to be the first full-blown war crimes trial.

Up until Monday, he had always exchanged warm smiles in the courtroom as the black-robed judge entered and left. Unlike other prisoners, he also stood in respect for his various judges.

He continued the practice of standing along with everyone in the court. But he cracked no smiles.

Part of the reason why Monday's hearing on the issue of his mental health and confinement was postponed was the absence of an expert. The Pentagon had refused a defense request to continue to engage as a consultant and expert witness a California psychiatrist who has evaluated Hamdan's health.

In February, the doctor, Emily Keram, filed an affidavit with the court that said Hamdan suffers nightmares, amnesia, anxiety, irritability, insomnia and a sense of ''hopelessness and helplessness'' as a result of his captivity as an enemy combatant.

Keram works with U.S. war veterans at the Veterans Administration and describes Hamdan as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.

But the Pentagon's Office of the Convening Authority refused to fund Keram's continued work on the case, a denial the Hamdan defense team was challenging.