Guantanamo detainee charged in Cole attack
WASHINGTON – U.S. military prosecutors Monday charged a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay prison with murder and other crimes for allegedly planning the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship, a bombing that killed 17 U.S. service members and injured nearly 50 others.
Pentagon officials announced eight charges against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent. He has been in U.S. custody since late 2002, and is one of three detainees the government has acknowledged subjecting to an interrogation technique that simulates drowning.
Nashiri’s “waterboarding” at the hands of CIA interrogators – a technique that human rights groups around the world have condemned as torture – figures to be a central element of his case. Defense attorneys immediately vowed to challenge any evidence obtained by coercion and criticized the Pentagon for moving forward with the military trial despite officials’ awareness of how he was treated.
Nancy Hollander, a civilian attorney in Albuquerque, N.M., who will represent Nashiri, said Monday that his treatment violates U.S. and international law. She called the military commissions “a farce.”
Nashiri contended at a military hearing last year that he confessed to masterminding the Cole attack only because he had been tortured, according to a transcript of that hearing.
Pentagon officials did not say why Nashiri is being charged now. He is the sixth “high value” detainee to face formal charges; five alleged terrorists were accused earlier this year of participating in the Sept. 11, 2001, conspiracy. He is also the first alleged Cole plotter the U.S. government has charged. Others have been tried in Yemen.
Prosecutors have recommended that Nashiri face the death penalty if convicted.
The case would be the first to proceed against a suspect in the Cole bombing in the nearly eight years since a small boat laden with TNT and other explosives pulled up alongside the destroyer in the Gulf of Aden and detonated, blowing a huge hole in it as it refueled in the Yemeni port. Nashiri allegedly conceived the Oct. 12, 2000, plot with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and supervised its execution.