Pentagon seeks death penalty in Cole bombing

MIAMI — The Pentagon announced Monday it would seek the death penalty against a Saudi Arabian accused of plotting the October 2000 terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, whom officials allege was the Al Qaeda chief for the Arabian Peninsula before his capture in 2002, faces charges of murder, conspiracy, treachery and five other terrorism-related acts if the proposed capital case is approved by the civilian head of the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunal.

Nashiri was one of three terrorism suspects subjected to the controversial interrogation tactic known as waterboarding while in secret CIA custody abroad, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Congress in February.

The procedure simulates drowning and has been deemed torture by human rights advocates and most U.S. allies. Military interrogators and FBI agents have renounced its use.

Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, was among 14 so-called high-value detainees moved from secret CIA prisons to the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006.

At his Combatant Status Review Tribunal six months later, a court-mandated intake procedure for each prisoner after his arrival at Guantanamo, Nashiri said that while in CIA custody he was tortured into confessing to the Cole bombing and other acts of terrorism.

Evidence submitted to the March 2007 review also linked Nashiri to the U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998 that killed at least 224 people. He was also said to have plotted the October 2002 attack on the French supertanker Limburg in which a crew member was killed and 90,000 barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Aden.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, legal advisor to tribunal Convening Authority Susan J. Crawford, was asked at a Pentagon news conference on Monday how the government expected to convict Nashiri on evidence that would be inadmissible in any other U.S. court. Hartmann said all evidence, including the allegations of torture, would be addressed by the tribunal.

Hartmann has spearheaded a drive by the tribunal to get high-profile cases under way before the November elections. The advisor was disqualified in May from one war crimes case after a judge ruled he lacked "independence from the prosecutor function."