The charges against the suspected al-Qaida bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri over the attack on the USS Cole have been dropped by a senior military judge. This means that the last terror trial at Guantanamo Bay detention facility has been halted.

The decision was taken by Susan Crawford, the top legal authority for military trials at Guantanamo Bay, in order to bring all cases into compliance with President Obama’s January 22nd executive order to halt terror court proceedings at the US army base in Cuba. The charges against al-Nahiri have been dismissed without prejudice, which means that new charges can be brought again later. For the time being, he will remain in prison.

Crawford’s ruling gives the White House the time to review the legal cases of all 245 terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay. Their task is to decide whether they should be prosecuted in the United States, or released to other nations.
Seventeen US sailors died on 12 October 2000 when al-Qaida suicide bombers steered a boat laden with explosives into the Cole, a guided missile destroyer, when it sat in a Yemeni port.  Saudi Arabian citizen al-Nashiri was charged by the Pentagon with ‘organising and directing’ the bombing, and planned to seek the death penalty in the case. In 2008 al-Nashiri said that during a Guantanamo hearing he confessed to helping plot the bombing of the Cole, but only because he was tortured by US interrogators. The CIA has admitted that he was among other terror suspects subjected to the technique of ‘waterboarding,’ which simulates drowning, during his interrogations in secret CIA prisons in 2002 and 2003.

The effect of President Obama’s executive order of January 22 is to shut down Guantanamo within a year. The order also froze all detainees’ legal cases, pending a three-month review as the administration decides whether to prosecute the suspects, some of whom have been held there for several years without being charged.