Arraignment sets yearlong timer for USS Cole case

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba – A reputed al-Qaida chieftain emerged from the shadows of CIA confinement and interrogation Wednesday to face death-penalty charges as the alleged engineer of the 2000 USS Cole bombing, and got a minimum one-year delay until his murder and terror trial date.

Seventeen American crew members were killed in the suicide attack a decade ago off Yemen. Some of the slain sailors’ families and a surviving supply officer watched stoically from a glass booth as Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 46, appeared in the white prison camp uniform of a cooperative Guantanamo captive.

The self-described former Saudi millionaire merchant from Mecca was clean-shaven and round-faced, stocky and smiling under questioning from the Army judge on whether he understood the Arabic-English translation.

Asked whether he accepted the services of his Pentagon-paid defense team, who argued the case was too tainted by torture to go forward, al-Nashiri replied: “At this moment these lawyers are doing the right job.” It was the public’s first look at the man who was waterboarded in CIA custody and interrogated with a revving drill and cocked gun near his head.

It’s also the first time the Obama administration is seeking the death penalty from a military commission. The jury of 12 U.S. military officers will be chosen at the soonest Nov. 9, 2012, to hear the case of the captive whom the Bush White House branded Osama bin Laden’s chief of Arabian Gulf terror operations.

At one point, al-Nashiri turned to the soundproofed spectator gallery at the opposite end of the tribunal chamber and waved.

Defense attorney Richard Kammen said his client was glad the process had begun after years in spaces no bigger than an 8-by-12-foot cell.

“He seemed cocky to me,” said John Clodfelter, whose 21-year-old sailor son Kenneth was killed in the attack.

The dad, a military veteran from Mechanicsville, Va., called the date “a long time coming.” He said he hoped the captive got the death penalty.

Rather than charge him at the time of his capture in Dubai in October 2002, CIA agents whisked him off to a series of overseas CIA “black sites” where he was subjected to interrogations that included mock executions, threats to his family and the simulated drowning technique to break his resistance.

The hearing was an arraignment – a formal presentation of charges, military-style, meaning the accused did not enter a plea of innocence or guilt. Instead his lawyers launched into the first round of what could be a year or more of motions that put U.S. intelligence and detention practices in the war court spotlight.