Hamdan is the prisoner whose lawsuit prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down as illegal the initial Guantanamo war crimes system in 2006. The charges against him were twice dismissed and then refiled and the military hopes to begin his trial in late May.
Hamdan faces life in prison if convicted of conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism. He has said he never joined al Qaeda, had no advance knowledge of its attacks and took a job as bin Laden's driver because he needed the $200 monthly salary to support his family.
Prosecutors say he was a trusted al Qaeda member who helped bin Laden escape U.S. forces in Afghanistan and that he had two anti-aircraft rockets in his car when he was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001.
The Bush administration set up the widely criticized Guantanamo court to try suspected al Qaeda operatives outside the regular civilian and military courts. It cited national security concerns and said captives who are not part of any national army do not deserve the rights and protections granted to formal prisoners of war.
Three other prosecutors quit the Guantanamo court in 2004 and said they thought the process was rigged to convict.
'MICROMANAGEMENT'
Davis' strongest criticism was aimed at Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser who was supposed to provide impartial advice to the trials' overseer.
He said Hartmann had effectively joined the prosecution team and "took micromanagement to the nanomanagement level." Davis said Hartmann tried to dictate which lawyer would try cases and overrode Davis' ban on filing charges that relied on evidence obtained through the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.
The Pentagon plans to try as many as 80 of the 280 prisoners in Guantanamo on war crimes charges, and 14 cases are currently pending. Since the United States began sending foreign captives to Guantanamo in 2002, only one case has been resolved, that of Australian former prisoner David Hicks.
Hicks avoided trial by pleading guilty to providing material support for terrorism and served a nine-month sentence as part of a plea negotiated by a Pentagon appointee without the chief prosecutor's involvement.
Davis testified that he "inherited" the Hicks case from a previous prosecutor and would not otherwise have charged him because he wanted to focus on cases serious enough to merit 20 years in prison and the Hicks case did not meet that test.
