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Guantanamo captive faces war-crimes charges in embassy bombing
Apr. 1, 2008
Carol Rosenberg - McClatchy NewspapersIssue date: 3/27/08 Section: MCT News
MIAMI _ A decade after he was indicted in New York, and four years after he was taken into U.S. custody, the Pentagon announced Monday that it will seek to try a Tanzanian man for war crimes in the 1998 East African bombings.
Ahmed Ghailani, in his 30s, is accused of conspiracy, murder and providing material support for terror in the Aug. 7, 1998 suicide attack at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. If convicted he could receive the death penalty.
That day, suicide bombers simultaneously struck at the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, a coordinated precursor of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Eleven Africans were killed and about 80 others were wounded in Dar as Salaam, the Tanzanian capital.
In charging Ghailani, the 14th Guantanamo captive now facing war crimes charges, the Pentagon is illustrating its determination to press forward with war crimes prosecutions by Military Commission _ the on-again, off-again war court that the Bush administration opened in August 2004 as the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.
A Manhattan federal court already had a decade-old indictment on the books against Ghailani, Osama bin Laden and others as co-conspirators in the bombings.
Pakistani forces captured Ghailani in raids on suspected al-Qaida hideouts in Punjab province in July 2004.
He spent about two years in secret CIA prisons and was sent to the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba in September 2006. After six months there, he confessed to unwittingly assisting in the embassy bombing in a hearing before a panel that certified him as an enemy combatant.
"It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them," Ghailani told the panel in March 2007, according to a Pentagon transcript. "So I apologize to the United States government for what I did. And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones."
Ghailani becomes the seventh war-on-terror captive recommended for a capital case at a military commission.
Ahmed Ghailani, in his 30s, is accused of conspiracy, murder and providing material support for terror in the Aug. 7, 1998 suicide attack at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. If convicted he could receive the death penalty.
That day, suicide bombers simultaneously struck at the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, a coordinated precursor of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Eleven Africans were killed and about 80 others were wounded in Dar as Salaam, the Tanzanian capital.
In charging Ghailani, the 14th Guantanamo captive now facing war crimes charges, the Pentagon is illustrating its determination to press forward with war crimes prosecutions by Military Commission _ the on-again, off-again war court that the Bush administration opened in August 2004 as the first U.S. war crimes tribunal since World War II.
A Manhattan federal court already had a decade-old indictment on the books against Ghailani, Osama bin Laden and others as co-conspirators in the bombings.
Pakistani forces captured Ghailani in raids on suspected al-Qaida hideouts in Punjab province in July 2004.
He spent about two years in secret CIA prisons and was sent to the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba in September 2006. After six months there, he confessed to unwittingly assisting in the embassy bombing in a hearing before a panel that certified him as an enemy combatant.
"It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them," Ghailani told the panel in March 2007, according to a Pentagon transcript. "So I apologize to the United States government for what I did. And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones."
Ghailani becomes the seventh war-on-terror captive recommended for a capital case at a military commission.
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