Jury selection has begun in the case against a Saudi man who is accused of orchestrating the bombing of a U.S. Navy ship that killed 17 American sailors more than 25 years ago.
The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 61, is the first prisoner at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face a death penalty trial in the military commission system that was set up after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Cole was on a refueling stop in the port of Aden, Yemen, on Oct. 12, 2000, when suicide bombers in an explosives-laden boat detonated their load. The explosion, at 11:18 a.m., as some of the sailors were gathering for lunch, blew a 30-foot-wide hole in the ship.
Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the bombing, which is seen as a precursor of the Sept. 11 attacks. The trial in that case is scheduled to begin in June 2028.
Both capital cases have common themes involving the torture of the defendants in C.I.A. custody in the early 2000s. Prosecutors in both cases litigated for years to try to use interrogations of the defendants at Guantánamo in 2007, and lost.
Jury selection for the Cole trial could last weeks. The first 36 military officers from a pool of 200 arrived at the base over the weekend. More could be brought to the base until a panel of 12 jurors and six alternates is chosen.
The pool is made up of officers from U.S. bases in the continental United States, Europe, Hawaii and Japan. More than 360 officers were screened through questionnaires about their opinions on several issues, including the death penalty, religious affiliation and how closely they have followed news reports about the case.
The officers were drawn from all the military branches, including Space Force, which, like the military commissions court, was created after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Nashiri has been in U.S. custody since he was captured in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, in 2002. He was charged at the court only in 2011.
Pretrial hearings focused on his first four years of detention in secret overseas prisons, where he was waterboarded, forced to stand in a cramped, pitch-black box the size of a coffin, and hung from a ceiling by his wrists to deprive him of sleep and break his will to resist during interrogation.
A U.S. interrogator also revved a power drill near Mr. Nashiri when he was blindfolded, making the prisoner believe he was about to be executed. In 2023, an Army judge excluded confessions that Mr. Nashiri later made to federal agents as contaminated by his prior cruel treatment.
The current judge, Col. Matthew Fitzgerald, had set jury selection to start on Oct. 19, then twice postponed the proceedings after lawyers for Mr. Nashiri challenged the prisoner’s competency to face trial.
In a week of hearings, two mental health experts testified that the prisoner was too incapacitated by flashbacks and other disturbances from his torture to understand the proceedings and assist in his defense.
Then an Army psychiatrist who examined Mr. Nashiri for the court diagnosed the prisoner with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, but found him cogent enough to be tried.
The judge ruled on Friday that Mr. Nashiri was competent for trial.
The Cole trial is the first contested trial at Guantánamo Bay in nearly two decades. Since 2010, eight detainees have been convicted by a military commission in previous cases by pleading guilty in exchange for promises of resettlement or repatriation.
With military execution a possibility, the stakes are higher in the case of Mr. Nashiri. In 2009, Congress gave the defense secretary the authority to decide the method of execution for wartime, foreign prisoners sentenced to death by military commission.
Secretary Pete Hegseth recently chose the firing squad for the Dec. 3 execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist who killed 13 Americans and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood, Texas.
At the court last week, Mr. Nashiri’s senior military defense lawyer asked the judge to postpone the trial for another six months.
Lt. Col. Joshua B. Nettinga of the Air Force said the defense had yet to review all the evidence in the case and was still engaging prosecutors over additional evidence they believed they were entitled to see.
Cmdr. Clayton G. Trivett Jr., the lead prosecutor, replied, “The time for justice is now.” Invoking the families of the 17 fallen soldiers, he added, “The Gold Star families have been waiting for justice for a long time.”
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