Three Bali nightclub bombing suspects who have been held in Guantanamo for get first day in court

Three Bali nightclub bombing suspects who have been held in Guantanamo for 18 years will get first day in court today as they are arraigned on charges of murder and terrorism. 

Indonesian prisoner Encep Nurjaman, known as Hambali, and two Malaysians, Nazir bin Lep and Mohammed Farik bin Amin, will go before a military commission in Cuba on Monday.   

Nurjaman was a leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian militant group with ties to al-Qaida, reportedly responsible for the 2002 and 2003 attacks in Southeast Asia. 

The U.S. government says he recruited militants, including bin Lep and Farik bin Amin, for jihadist operations.

Among the plots that al-Qaida and Jemaah Islamiyah carried out were the October 2002 suicide bombings of Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Club in Bali, Indonesia.

They are also charged in connection with the August 2003 suicide bombing of the J.W. Marriott in Jakarta, Indonesia. 

The attacks together killed 213 people, including seven Americans, and injured 109 people. Dozens of victims were foreign tourists, mostly Australians.

Prosecutors allege bin Lep and Farik bin Amin served as intermediaries in the transfer of money used to fund the group’s operations.

It is the first step in what could be a long legal journey for a case that involves evidence tainted by CIA torture.

This is the same issue that is largely responsible for causing other war crimes cases to languish for years at Guantanamo.

The hearing also comes as the Biden administration says it intends to close the detention center.

The U.S. still holds 39 of the 779 men seized in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks and invasion of Afghanistan.

The three men charged in connection with the bombings were held in secret CIA confinement for three years, followed by 15 more at the isolated US base in Cuba. 

The decision to charge them was made by a Pentagon legal official at the end of the Trump administration.

This further complicates the effort to close the detention center, said Brian Bouffard, a lawyer for Mohammed Nazir bin Lep, and makes it more difficult for the new administration to add any to the list of those who could potentially be transferred out of Guantanamo or even sent home. 

‘It will even be harder after an arraignment,’ Bouffard said, but whether the arraignment would actually take place is not certain.

Lawyers have sought to put the case on hold for a number of reasons, including what they have said is insufficient access to interpreters and other resources to mount a defense. The accused were still expected to show up for the hearing.

The Navy judge presiding over the case in the commission, a hybrid of military and civilian law, is expected to consider that question before the charges can be formally presented in a secure courtroom surrounded by coils of razor wire on the base.

All three were captured in Thailand in 2003 and transferred to CIA ‘black sites,’ where they were brutalized and subjected to torture, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2014. 

In 2006, they were moved to Guantanamo, and it remains unclear why it’s taken so long to charge them before the military commission. 

Military prosecutors filed charges against the men in June 2017, but the Pentagon legal official who oversees Guantanamo cases rejected the charges for reasons that haven’t been publicly disclosed.

The case has many elements that make it complex, including whether statements the men made to authorities can hold up in court because of the abuse they experienced in CIA custody.

There is also the fact that people have already been convicted, and in some cases executed, in Indonesia for the attack, and the long time it has taken to even bring charges.

Some of these same issues have come up in the case against five Guantanamo prisoners charged for planning and aiding the September 11 attacks. 

They were arraigned in May 2012 and remain in the pretrial phase, with no trial date yet scheduled.

Bin Amin’s lawyer, Christine Funk, predicted a lengthy period of defense investigation that will require extensive travel, once the pandemic is over, to interview witnesses and look for evidence. 

Still, she said, her client is ‘anxious and eager to litigate this case and go home.’