The death-penalty trial of a prisoner accused of plotting the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole warship has been set to begin in October 2025. If the plan holds, the trial would coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Qaeda attack, which killed 17 U.S. sailors off the coast of Yemen.
Col. Matthew S. Fitzgerald, an Army judge, reserved a courtroom at Guantánamo Bay for the trial from Oct. 6, 2025, until Dec. 19 of that year, according to an order released by the court on Friday. Based on the court calendar, it would reach trial before the Sept. 11 case, whose judge has set 23 weeks of pretrial hearings for next year.
Military judges in the Cole case have set and then abandoned more than a half-dozen proposed trial dates since the prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was arraigned in 2011. Mr. Nashiri, who is from Saudi Arabia, was captured in 2002. He is accused of helping to orchestrate the suicide attack on the U.S. Navy destroyer while it was on a refueling stop in Aden, Yemen. The bombing, on Oct. 12, 2000, was seen as a precursor of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Colonel Fitzgerald has yet to publish deadlines for pretrial matters, a step that typically accompanies a trial date. His schedule envisions 12 weeks of pretrial hearings next year.
“I’m a cautious optimist,” the judge said in court on May 31, disclosing plans to set the dates. “I believe that’s a fair and reasonable date based on my voluminous review of the voluminous record.”
At least eight parents of the fallen sailors, many whom had regularly attended pretrial proceedings, have died while waiting for a trial.
Anthony J. Natale, Mr. Nashiri’s lead lawyer, expressed skepticism that the case could reach trial in 15 months.
“It is irrational at best to believe everything can be done and can be done correctly in that time frame,” Mr. Natale said in an interview. “You only have so much resources and so much time.”
“Unless the judge holds full and fair pretrial hearings,” he continued, “with witnesses and a proper schedule for briefing the issues, it will be nearly if not impossible for the defense to provide the effective assistance of counsel.”
Several obstacles could derail that ambition, including challenges over evidence the government wants to use in the case.
Last year, the previous judge ruled that Mr. Nashiri’s confessions to federal agents at Guantánamo in 2007 were derived from torture by the C.I.A. and excluded accounts of the interrogation from the case.
Mr. Nashiri was held incommunicado by the agency for four years, starting in 2002. During that time, he was waterboarded, confined to wooden boxes, deprived of sleep, sodomized and threatened with his death and that of his mother. The judge, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr., said the prisoner’s capacity to resist his interrogators “was intentionally and literally beaten out of him.”
Prosecutors are appealing that decision to a Pentagon appellate panel, and the issue could reach the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia before a trial begins.
Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers are seeking to call witnesses before the trial in other challenges to proposed government evidence that they argue is also tainted by torture.
And the prisoner’s legal team is in transition.
Lt. Cmdr. Alaric A. Piette, a former Navy SEAL, who has the longest relationship with Mr. Nashiri of any current lawyer, has asked the judge’s permission to leave the case after seven years in the job. Commander Piette represented Mr. Nashiri alone for a time because other defense lawyers quit the case after discovering an eavesdropping device in their meeting room.
Mr. Natale is retiring, but his replacement, Allison F. Miller, has not received a security clearance to meet Mr. Nashiri and appear at the Guantánamo court. Judge Fitzgerald has ruled that Mr. Natale can leave the case after Ms. Miller has been fully assigned and meets with Mr. Nashiri, and he can question the prisoner about her representation of him.
Ms. Miller, like Mr. Natale, is a “learned counsel,” or lawyer with recognized expertise in defending capital defendants, a statutorily required role in the Guantánamo death penalty cases. She previously represented defendants in 10 capital jury trials in Florida courts, one of which resulted in a death penalty.
She was also a legal consultant in the case of a man who pleaded guilty to killing 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018 and was sentenced to life without parole rather than death.
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