Politics
Judge Again Delays Guantánamo’s First Death-Penalty Terror Trial
The military judge in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case on Monday reset the start of jury selection to Oct. 19, more than 26 years after the suicide bombing in a port in the Middle East killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded dozens of others.
Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, an Army judge, said that government agencies were unlikely to process classified evidence in time for what was to be a June 1 start date for the national security trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
A Saudi citizen, Abd-al Rahim al-Nashiri is accused of orchestrating the attack on the U.S. Navy destroyer off Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000 as an acolyte of Osama bin Laden. The death penalty case has been shadowed by the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture on the defendant.
Judges at the U.S. naval station in Cuba have set and then abandoned about 10 earlier trial start dates. Pretrial litigation has gone on so long, since Mr. Nashiri was charged in 2011, that three previous judges and all of the initial defense and prosecution lawyers retired from the case or left it for personal or professional reasons.
Mr. Nashiri was captured in Dubai in October 2002. First, he spent about 1,390 days in the custody of the C.I.A., which subjected him to waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme isolation, rectal and other forms of abuse, primarily in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Thailand, according to agency and Senate reports.
The Secretive World of Guantánamo Bay
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U.S.S. Cole: The Army judge in the bombing case ordered the prosecution to do its “due diligence” in providing defense lawyers with any evidence the U.S. government might have “regarding Iran’s role” in the attack off Yemen 25 years ago. President Trump has said Iran was “probably involved.”
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Torture Ruling: A government lawyer appealed to a Pentagon review court to overturn a torture ruling in the Sept. 11 case that disqualified the use of the confessions of a man accused of conspiring in the hijacking plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.
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Cuban Deportees: The long, circuitous journey of dozens of Cuban men who were designated for deportation from the United States last year but instead taken to a prison at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay ended when they were repatriated to Cuba.
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Guantánamo Prison Enters 25th Year: The prison has outlasted the war in Afghanistan, has employed tens of thousands of temporary troops and holds six men charged but not yet tried in death penalty cases.
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A Curious Collaboration: An unlikely collection of portraits has given the public its only glimpse inside the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
The Cole bombing, by two Al Qaeda recruits who blew themselves up on a small, explosives- laden skiff, was a precursor of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and Mr. Nashiri’s case is on track to become the first capital trial at Guantánamo Bay.
A judge in each case has ruled against the use of a defendant’s confessions because they were contaminated by their years in the C.I.A.’s brutal detention and interrogation program — out of reach of the courts, defense lawyers and International Red Cross.
The defendants were moved to Guantánamo in September 2006 and interrogated by federal agents to build cases against them without warnings against self-incrimination and the right to consult a lawyer.
The Cole trial is expected to last at least six months, and would start on Oct. 19 with the military shuttling 50 U.S. officers at a time there from a pool of 350 men and women to establish a jury of 12 with six alternate members. Guantánamo is so small, a 45-square-mile base with about 4,500 residents and limited guest quarters, that it would be logistically difficult to bring the entire pool down.
Last week, prosecutors in the Sept. 11 case asked a military judge to set deadlines for starting the four-man conspiracy trial in May 2027. Prosecutors had earlier proposed Jan. 11, 2027, but concluded it was not practical even before arguing for it to Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, their presiding judge.
Colonel Schrama said Monday that he would look at setting a trial schedule after he rules on some key pretrial evidentiary motions, probably over the summer, involving Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of being the mastermind of the plot, and two other defendants.
Both cases have dragged on so long in part because no court case in U.S. history has dealt with the volume of classified information involved in this case, which is guarding secret government activities and surveillance that started with the war against terrorism.
Some Navy shipmates who survived the Cole attack and the relatives of victims of both the Cole and Sept. 11 attacks have died waiting for the trials to begin. Family members have been traveling to the base since the arraignment in 2011 to watch pretrial proceedings.