A Pentagon official has rejected a proposal to settle the U.S.S. Cole bombing case with a plea agreement and a sentence of up to life in prison, setting the stage for the first death penalty trial at Guantánamo Bay to start this summer, lawyers said on Thursday.
The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 61, is accused of orchestrating the attack in Aden harbor in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000, that killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens of others. Two suicide bombers for Al Qaeda in an explosives-laden skiff came alongside the destroyer and blew it up, foreshadowing the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Nashiri has been in U.S. custody since 2002 and was charged in 2011. Since then, the court has worked its way through pretrial proceedings that protected national security evidence, much of it involving Mr. Nashiri’s torture during his years in C.I.A. prisons, 2002 to 2006.
Parents of slain sailors and their shipmates have themselves passed away waiting for the trial to begin, and some family members and survivors supported the plea deal to avert the years of appeals that would follow a conviction and death sentence.
On Thursday morning, prosecutors notified the victims and relatives of those killed in the attack of the decision by Steve Feinberg, the deputy defense secretary, to reject the agreement. They invited them to sign up to attend the trial, which is scheduled to start with the selection of a military jury on June 1 and could last six months.
Family members and Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers have said that prosecutors also supported the agreement, which had been reached last year.
In it, Mr. Nashiri would have admitted to his specific role in the attack and a military panel would have decided a sentence in the range of 20 years to life in prison. Victims would have testified to their loss, and defense lawyers and the defendant could have offered arguments for leniency that would probably have included descriptions of his torture.
Paul Abney, a retired Navy master chief who survived the blast, said on Thursday that he had supported the plea bargain to resolve the case sooner “mainly for the family members, and for the survivors. It’s been a long, drawn-out process.”
“There may be families that want to see the death penalty,” he said. “Personally, I’d just like to see an end to this, to get some accountability and to give some finality to this thing.”
Mr. Abney said he would attend the trial at Guantánamo Bay to represent the ship, those who had died and survivors who find the trip too painful.
The prosecutors, who were led by two U.S. Navy lawyers, “wanted the plea deal,” Mr. Abney said, and “they spent a lot of time working on that.”
The chief prosecutor, Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, and the lead prosecutor, Capt. Timothy J. Stinson, declined to comment on the decision.
The case against Mr. Nashiri is the longest-running capital case at Guantánamo Bay. It is a precursor to the better-known Sept. 11 case, in which five men are charged with conspiring in the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people — and still has no trial date.
After Mr. Nashiri’s lawyers obtained material describing his torture, they managed to get the military judge to exclude a key confession from Mr. Nashiri as tainted by his torture. Prosecutors then appealed to reinstate the evidence, but lost.
As a result, much of the trial evidence will likely involve U.S. agents testifying about people they questioned at the time in Yemen, financial transactions and other documents they tied to an alias for Mr. Nashiri, who is accused of helping the bombers acquire vessels, explosives and safe houses.
Mr. Nashiri’s lawyer, Allison F. Miller, said the deal “would have brought actual finality to a nearly 26-year-old crime.” Instead, she said, if Mr. Nashiri is convicted, “this case will likely last through decades of appellate and post-conviction litigation.”
Ms. Miller predicted that the trial itself would air “the horrors perpetuated against Mr. al-Nashiri by the American government.”
Testimony in the pretrial phase has shown that C.I.A. staff and contractors subjected him to waterboarding, rectal abuse and sleep deprivation, among other “enhanced interrogation techniques” to make sure he would cooperate with his interrogators.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
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