The Pentagon on Friday formally approved war crimes charges against a Guantanamo detainee accused of masterminding the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, potentially setting up a high-profile arraignment in the final days of the Bush administration. Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri faces a possible death sentence if convicted on charges related to the attack on the Navy destroyer that killed 17 US sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden, said Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon. Formal approval of charges, including murder, treachery and terrorism, triggered a 30-day clock for Al-Nashiri's first appearance before a US military commission at the Guantanamo Bay Navy base.
Al-Nashiri's Pentagon-appointed attorney, Navy Lt Cmdr Stephen Reyes, called the timing 'suspect' because president-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on January 20, has criticised the commissions and vowed to close the detention centre. Al-Nashiri, a Saudi of Yemeni descent, has been imprisoned at Guantanamo since 2006. He is one of the three terrorist suspects that the CIA has said it subjected to water-boarding in secret overseas prisons. The Pentagon also announced that it had dismissed pending charges against another detainee, Abdul Ghani, who was accused of firing rockets at a coalition military base in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002. The charges were dropped without prejudice and no explanation was provided.
Allegations denied: Also on Friday, Gordon rejected allegations that Guantanamo officials abused one of the first detainees ordered freed by a US federal judge. Mustafa Ait Idr told a private television station upon arriving in Bosnia this week that interrogators broke one of his fingers and that his captors desecrated the holy Quran. "The Department of Defence policy is clear. We treat all detainees humanely," Gordon said.
The 38-year-old Algerian and two other Algerian-born naturalised Bosnians were detained in 2001 on suspicion of plotting to bomb the US Embassy in Sarajevo. They had been held at Guantanamo since January 2002. A US federal judge ruled last month they should be released, saying the US government's evidence linking the men to Al Qaeda was not credible because it came from a single, unidentified source. The cases of more than 200 additional Guantanamo detainees are still pending, many in front of other judges in Washington's federal courts.
Hunger strike: A judge has ordered an independent medical examination for a Saudi prisoner at Guantanamo who has been on hunger strike for more than three years. US District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled on Thursday after a hearing in Washington that a court-appointed medical expert would evaluate Ahmed Zuhair's physical and mental health, which his lawyers say has deteriorated sharply in recent weeks. Last month, his lawyer returned from visiting Zuhair and said his client appeared to weigh no more than 100 pounds and was vomiting repeatedly during meetings at the US base in Cuba.
Zuhair has been on a hunger strike to protest his confinement since the summer of 2005. He has not been charged with a crime, but the US says he trained with the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and was a member of an Islamic fighting group in Bosnia in the mid-1990s.