WASHINGTON — After years of delay, the U.S. official overseeing navy commissions at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Thursday authorized the prosecution of three Southeast Asian prisoners accused of conspiring in two lethal terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003.
The Pentagon introduced the costs two days after Lloyd J. Austin III, President Biden’s protection secretary nominee, instructed Congress that the administration “doesn’t intend to convey new detainees to the power and can search to shut it.”
Prosecutors accused the three males — Encep Nurjaman, who is called Hambali; Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep; and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin — of homicide, terrorism and conspiracy within the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 folks, and the 2003 Marriott resort bombing in Jakarta, which killed no less than 11 folks and wounded no less than 80.
Mr. Hambali, who’s Indonesian, has been within the custody of the US since 2003. He’s held at Guantánamo as the previous chief of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian extremist group that grew to become an affiliate of Al Qaeda earlier than the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.
The case had been on maintain all through the Trump administration. The chief prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark S. Martins, first authorized prices towards Mr. Hambali alone in 2017, however a sequence of officers who held the title of convening authority for navy commissions refused to approve them.
Then on Thursday, the Pentagon introduced that Col. Jeffrey D. Wooden of the Arkansas Nationwide Guard, who relies in Little Rock and has been the convening authority since April, authorized the case for trial. It’s first new case at Guantánamo Bay since 2014, and the Pentagon offered no clarification.
“The fees are solely allegations that the accused dedicated offenses punishable below the Army Commissions Act,” a Protection Division announcement stated, “and the accused are presumed harmless until confirmed responsible past an inexpensive doubt.”
Underneath navy fee procedures, the prisoners are to be introduced earlier than a navy decide for arraignment inside 30 days. However there isn’t a resident navy decide on the base, the prisoners’ attorneys are primarily based in the US, and though the bottom has begun vaccinations, commanders there require all guests to be quarantined for 14 days on arrival.
Even earlier than the coronavirus pandemic halted most battle courtroom proceedings and prevented almost each authorized go to at Guantánamo, navy officers had questioned the potential of the bottom’s crude Camp Justice infrastructure to deal with extra pretrial proceedings. In the course of the Trump administration, the U.S. Southern Command marketed for contracts to construct a prefabricated courtroom able to attempting three males collectively, however deserted the hassle with out clarification.
A former Obama administration official conversant in the Guantánamo closure effort questioned the timing, calling the transfer an try to jam the incoming administration.
Maj. James Valentine, a Marine lawyer who has represented Mr. Hambali for years, referred to Common Austin’s remarks and accused navy officers of performing “desperately in a state of panic earlier than the brand new administration may get settled.”
“The torture regime hit the panic button after yesterday’s inauguration,” he stated.
The authorized cost sheet reveals that any person made wording modifications to it on Jan. 13, after which Colonel Wooden made just a few edits on Thursday, the day he authorized it.
The three males have been held at Guantánamo since September 2006. They have been captured in Thailand in August 2003 in a joint Thai-U.S. intelligence raid. Then they spent about three years within the secret C.I.A. jail community the place some prisoners have been subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, painful shackling and different now-outlawed “enhanced interrogation” strategies.
In 2003, a C.I.A. interrogator instructed Mr. Hambali “that he would by no means go to courtroom, as a result of ‘we are able to by no means let the world know what I’ve achieved to you,’” in line with a abstract of the great research of the C.I.A. program that was launched by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December 2014.
The case, as authorized, doesn’t allow prosecutors to pursue the dying penalty, that means the administration may search to resume negotiations towards a responsible plea with the sentences served elsewhere. In November 2016, Common Martins traveled to Malaysia with two particular envoys of the Obama administration in a failed effort to get the federal government there to comply with incarcerate Mr. Bin Amin as a battle felony convicted by the US.
In earlier circumstances, prosecutors labored out responsible pleas with detainees who grew to become authorities informants in trade for serving their sentences in their very own nations. Malaysia apparently balked on the concept of endorsing a navy commissions conviction.
It was not instantly identified on Thursday whether or not the State Division had alerted the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia of the choice to take the boys to trial.