Bali bomb plotters get five extra years in Guantanamo Bay

A military jury at Guantánamo Bay on Friday sentenced two detainees to 23 years in prison for plotting the 2002 terrorist bombing that killed 202 people in Bali, Indonesia. But the men could be released by 2029 under a secret deal and with sentence credit.

Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, have been held by the United States since the summer of 2003, starting with three years in CIA black-site prisons where they were tortured. They pleaded guilty to war crimes last week.

About a dozen relatives of tourists killed in the attacks spent an emotional week in court testifying to their continued grief. A jury of five U.S. military officers, convened to decide on a sentence of 20 to 25 years, returned 23 years Friday after about two hours of deliberation.

But, unbeknownst to jurors, a senior Pentagon official reached a secret agreement with the defendants over the summer that they would be sentenced to up to six additional years. In exchange for the reduced sentence, they were required to provide testimony that could be used in the trial of an Indonesian prisoner known as Hambali, who is accused of masterminding the Bali bombings and other plots as the leader of the Qaeda affiliate. group Jemaah Islamiyah.

Subsequently, the judge, Lt. Col. Wesley A. Braun, separately vacated Bin Amin's sentence of 311 days and Bin Lep's sentence of 379 days, saying prosecutors had missed court deadlines for turning over evidence to lawyers during the preparing their case. .

But the men were able to go home earlier. “The provisional agreement considers the possibility of repatriation before the sentence is served,” said Brian Bouffard, Mr. Bin Lep's lawyer. When they are returned, he added, it will be under Malaysia's state-run deradicalization program and a lifetime of surveillance by national security authorities.

It took so long for the men to come to justice partly because of the time they spent in the CIA's secret overseas prison network, where prisoners were tortured during interrogations. Even after they agreed to plead guilty to their crimes and cooperate with prosecutors, the legacy of torture cast a shadow over the proceedings.

Christine A. Funk, a lawyer, projected Mr Bin Amin's drawings of his torture onto a screen in the courtroom as she described him as a broken man who cooperated with authorities at the time of his capture in Thailand. In addition to his three years at the CIA black sites, she said, he spent his first 10 years in Guantánamo Bay in solitary confinement.

“Upon arriving at the black sites, he was immediately tortured,” she said. “Not immediately interrogated. Immediately tortured.”

She cited federal and congressional investigations that confirmed he was held naked in isolation while chained in painful positions, had water poured down his nose and throat, and was forced to squat with a broom behind his knees. Each situation was illustrated with a drawing that now serves as evidence in the case.

“This is, quite frankly, un-American,” she said. “This is not who we are. But it is what we did.”

The chief prosecutor, Col. George C. Kraehe, said the real victims of torture were the families of the dead, “who have been shocked and terrorized for their lives, deprived of their dear loved ones, stolen from them by the barbaric acts of the suspect. .”

“Our job here is not to give justice to the accused,” Colonel Kraehe said. “Our job here is to get justice to the victims.”

He defended the CIA's interrogation program as a product of its time, “at the dawn of the war on terror, when the United States sought to defend itself and the world against forces that had brutally attacked the United States, killing thousands innocents had died. that had attacked other countries, forces that sought to destroy the American way of life. This war continues to this day.”

Moreover, he said, the defendants “left this program approximately 18 years ago.”

Mr Bin Lep was also tortured, Mr Bouffard said. But he has decided to forgive those who did it and move on.

Both the defense and prosecution gave the jury a lesson in conspiracy as a war crime, explaining that the men became complicit in the Bali bombing by training with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan before the attacks and by helping the perpetrators escape afterward. capture.

Mr. Bin Lep “may not have planned the bombings, may not have carried them out, may not have known when and where,” Mr. Bouffard said. “But he helped the people who did.”

The chief attorney for military commissions, Brig. General Jackie L. Thompson Jr. issued a statement lamenting how long it took to bring the men to justice. He said the U.S. decision after September 11 to establish the CIA interrogation program “frustrated everyone's desire for accountability and justice.”