Late move to prosecute Bali accused ‘panicky’ call
After years of delay, the US official overseeing military commissions at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, yesterday approved the prosecution of three prisoners accused of conspiring in two deadly terrorist bombings in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003.
The Pentagon announced the charges two days after Lloyd Austin, President Joe Biden’s defence-secretary nominee, told Congress the administration “does not intend to bring new detainees to the facility and will seek to close it”.
Prosecutors accused the Southeast Asian trio — Encep Nurjaman, known as Hambali; Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep; and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin — of murder, terrorism and conspiracy in the 2002 nightclub bombings in Bali, which killed 202 people, and the
2003 Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta, which killed at least 11 and hurt at least 80.
Hambali, an Indonesian, has been in the custody of the United States since 2003. He led Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian extremist group that became an affiliate of al Qaeda before September 11, 2001.
The case had been on hold throughout the Trump administration. The chief prosecutor, Brigadier General Mark Martins, first approved charges against Hambali alone in
2017, but a series of officials who held the title of convening authority for military commissions refused to approve them.
Then yesterday, the Pentagon said Colonel Jeffrey Wood of the Arkansas National Guard, the convening authority since April, approved the case for trial. It is the first new case at Guantnamo Bay since 2014, and the Pentagon provided no explanation.
“The charges are only allegations that the accused committed offences punishable under the Military Commissions Act,” the Defence Department said.
Under military commission procedures, the prisoners are to be brought before a military judge for arraignment within 30 days. But there is no resident military judge at the base, the prisoners’ lawyers are based in the US, and although the base has begun coronavirus vaccinations, commanders there require all arrivals to be quarantined 14 days.
Major James Valentine, a Marine lawyer who has represented Hambali for years, referred to Austin’s remarks and accused military officials of acting “desperately in a state of panic before the new administration could get settled. The torture regime hit the panic button after yesterday’s inauguration.”
The charge sheet shows that somebody made wording changes to it January 13, and Wood made edits yesterday, the day he approved it.
The three men have been held at Guantnamo since September 2006. They were captured in Thailand in August 2003 in a joint Thai-US intelligence raid, then they spent about three years in the secret CIA prison network where some prisoners were subjected to waterboarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, painful shackling and other now-outlawed “enhanced interrogation” methods.