Salim Ahmed Hamdan was Osama bin Laden's driver for five years.

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WASHINGTON — An impoverished former taxi driver from Yemen who chauffeured Osama bin Laden around Afghanistan has dealt the White House a defeat in the legal war on terror.

It was Salim Ahmed Hamdan's victory in the U.S. Supreme Court last week that outlawed the first U.S. military tribunals since World War II and forced President Bush and Congress to begin revamping U.S. policy toward the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The Supreme Court ruling also is likely to increase pressure at home and abroad for Bush to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities.

"Here is a young former driver for Osama bin Laden who has become the figurehead for a landmark Supreme Court ruling," says Scott L. Silliman, a former career Air Force lawyer now serving as executive director of Duke University law school's center on law, ethics and national security. "People may forget what Hamdan did or the charges that he faced, but his name will forever be synonymous with the Supreme Court saying that a president acting as a war-fighting commander is still constrained by Congress and international law."

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, Hamdan's defense lawyer, relayed word of the decision to Hamdan by telephone late Thursday.

"I think he was awe-struck that the court would rule for him and give a little man like him an equal chance," Swift said.

It's an improbable role for Hamdan, an only child with a fourth-grade education orphaned at an early age by the death of his parents from illness in an oasis community in the mountainous desert of southeastern Yemen, according to Jonathan Mahler, who is researching a book about Hamdan.

Hamdan joined a group of about 35 Muslim men bound for the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan in 1996 to fight with an Islamic insurgency against the Russian-backed government.

Nasser al-Bahri, who served as Hamdan's mentor as the group headed through northern Afghanistan toward the Tajik border, recalled his protege "as almost childlike, a cheerful, simple-minded man," Mahler wrote.

After the would-be fighters were turned back at the Afghan-Tajik border, Hamdan and the others returned to Afghanistan where he heard bin Laden appeal for enlistments to expel U.S. forces from the Arabian peninsula.

Pentagon prosecutors accuse Hamdan of serving as bin Laden's bodyguard and personal driver from 1996 until he was captured by Afghan warlords and turned over to U.S. forces in November 2001.

Hamdan, 36, a father of two daughters, arrived at Guantanamo Bay in May 2002, where his case became the cutting edge of efforts by defense lawyers to overturn the Bush administration's legal offensive against terrorist suspects. Hamdan has been charged with conspiring to commit terrorism and, if convicted, could face life imprisonment.

Swift said his client was "humble, not jubilant, and very, very thankful" that he had scored a legal victory. "It was gratifying to hear the belief in his voice, the recognition that mighty people don't always get to do what they want."