Developments here.

Osama bin Laden’s ex-driver and a Canadian child soldier captured in Afghanistan face arraignment next week at Guantanamo Bay under a US military process slammed by activists as a travesty of justice.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni national born in 1970, is accused of serving both as an armed bodyguard to the Al Qaeda mastermind and as bin Laden’s personal chauffeur.

The government alleges that Toronto-born Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was 15 when he was seized in Afghanistan five years ago, murdered a US army sergeant with a hand grenade during a raid on an Al Qaeda hideout.

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“In Khadr’s case, we have a kid who was, according to the government’s own allegation, dragged off by his father from the age of 10 to meet Al Qaeda leaders, sent off to military training camp at age 15 and then sent to the battlefield to be shot at. That hardly qualifies as the worst of the worst.” Article

Data (no doubt some of which is carefully tailored) oozes out on the latest suicide:

The Guantanamo prisoner who died in his cell this week was a Saudi army veteran who trained with U.S. soldiers in his homeland before going to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan, military records showed on Thursday.

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He is the fourth detainee to die of apparent suicide at the camp, which holds about 380 captives. Another 395 have been released or transferred to other governments since the camp opened in January 2002.

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According to records previously released by the U.S. military, al Aameri told his captors he had been trained by Americans during the nine years and four months he served in the Saudi army.

He said went to Afghanistan six months after leaving the army because he felt it was his duty to fight jihad, or holy war, when asked by a Muslim government, in this case the Taliban. But he denied he intended to fight Americans.

“Had his desire been to fight and kill Americans, he could have done that while he was side by side with them in Saudi Arabia,” he said through a U.S. military officer assigned as his representative before an administrative panel that classified him as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” Article

More:

Though it gave no details about him, U.S. records say he was 34 and had been held without charges at the prison at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in southeastern Cuba since February 2002.

Al-Amry had no attorney of record, although the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights has filed a blanket legal challenge on behalf of all Guantanamo detainees. Lawyers say many detainees have little faith in the American legal system but others simply do not understand it.

“People just don’t know where to turn so there are absolutely people in Guantanamo who want a lawyer but don’t have one,” said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney for the British human rights group Reprieve, which represents 37 detainees.

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Al-Amry was said by another detainee to have been on a hunger strike in March. Military records recently obtained by The Associated Press suggest he had also refused food in the past, with his weight dropping below 90 pounds at one point in 2005. He weighed 150 pounds when he entered Guantanamo. Article

Related:

Prisoners in Camp 5, which is similar to the highest-security U.S. prisons, are kept in individual, solid-wall cells and allowed outside for only two hours a day of recreation in an enclosed area.

Wells Dixon, a defense attorney who met with detainees at Camp 5 last month, said many showed signs of desperation.

“I can assure you that it is hell on earth,” Dixon said. “You can see the despair on the faces of detainees. It’s transparent.”

Other critics said detainees are frustrated at being held indefinitely without charges.

“You have five and a half years of desperation there with no legal way out,” said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents hundreds of Guantanamo detainees. “Sadly, it leads to people being so desperate they take their own lives.”

Lawyer Julia Tarver Mason, whose firm represents eight Saudi detainees at Guantanamo, said the government so far has declined to tell her if the man who died was among her clients. There are about 80 detainees from Saudi Arabia held at Guantanamo. Article