BIN LADEN’S COOK IN A GITMO STEW….PLEADS GUILTY
http://www.military.com/news/article/bin-ladens-cook-pleads-guilty-at-gitmo.html
Bin Laden’s Cook Pleads Guilty at Gitmo
July 08, 2010
Miami Herald
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi was Osama bin Laden’s sometime driver and an accountant who cooked for terrorists. He occasionally took to the battlefield, where he dodged enemy fire from U.S. Apache choppers.
He brought his wife and kids along when he joined bin Laden in Afghanistan. Human rights activists consider him something of a lackey. Prosecutors view him as a key al-Qaida logistician who was part of bin Laden’s inner circle and knew America’s most wanted man.
On Wednesday, the 50-year-old Sudanese citizen became the first person convicted in the newly revised military commissions at Guantanamo Bay Navy Base. His is the first guilty verdict here under Barack Obama’s presidency, which prosecutors say vindicates a beleaguered war crimes court that civil rights activists believe is a sham clouded in secrecy.
A hearing
Qosi pleaded guilty to both charges he faced: conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism. A military jury will deliberate his sentence after a hearing Aug. 9 where both sides get to present witnesses. Prosecutors would not reveal the terms of his plea agreement, and the defense team declined to comment, but presumably the government agreed to sentence him to considerably less than the life in prison he faces.
Citing two anonymous sources who read the plea agreement, the Dubai-based Al Arabiya satellite news network reported that Qosi agreed to a maximum of two more years in prison before he is sent home to Sudan.
“We view this as a success,” said the chief Pentagon war crimes prosecutor, Navy Capt. John Murphy. “The conviction validates the commission process and advances the hearings.”
Prosecutors say they hope to get more guilty pleas in the coming months, which could help the Obama administration with its goal of emptying the detention center. Obama’s deadline to close the facility passed nearly six months ago as Congress balks and refuses to let the government house detainees on U.S. soil.
But the process is still under attack by activists, who believe that U.S. federal courts would make a more transparent venue for people who, like Qosi, have been locked up for nearly a decade.
“He’s a cook who served as a driver and possibly a body guard,” said Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for Human Rights Watch. “Can you imagine if during Nuremberg they prosecuted cooks and drivers? It didn’t happen. They consider the fourth conviction in eight years a victory?”
Sullivan noted that Qosi’s accusations of abuse, including that he was wrapped in an Israeli flag and subjected to loud music, were not mentioned in court Wednesday.
“Did al Qosi get his day in court? I would say he did not,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jamil Dakwar, director of the human rights program for the organization’s legal department. “You will have people plead guilty, giving it a shot to get out of here. It means desperation. It means an unfair process.”
Navy Capt. David Iglesias, a case prosecutor, stressed that that’s why Judge Nancy Paul, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, spent nearly three hours going through Qosi’s plea agreement with him line by line to be sure he understood it and was not forced.
His work
Qosi admitted that his work for al-Qaida was his family’s only means of support, and that he left Sudan to follow bin Laden to Afghanistan. He went to Pakistan for al-Qaida and met the Taliban’s top leader, Mullah Omar, who used to stop by the terrorist compound on holidays.
Qosi said he drove a caravan of vans when bin Laden and his associates went to Kandahar, where married and single terrorists were separated into groups in two-room apartments. Qosi cooked for the bachelors.
He also spent more than a year on the front lines, getting bombed on the Pakistan border and coming under fire from U.S. helicopters in Jalalabad.
“He admitted to knowing [bin Laden] personally, helping him and was willing to follow him around,” Iglesias said. “He was somewhere between a foot soldier and less than a general. We are not talking about robbing a 7-Eleven in Hialeah. We are talking about war crimes.”
Qosi’s conviction marks just the fourth time in eight years that a Guantanamo detainee is convicted of a crime.
At the center
Some 181 remain here, among them five others facing war crimes charges and 13 captives whom federal courts have ordered released as unlawfully detained. A significant chunk of the rest are Yemenis who could go home if the Obama administration reached a repatriation agreement with that country to monitor their movements.
When Qosi is sentenced next month by a jury of U.S. military officers from around the world, it will be the first time two panels take place at once: Canadian Omar Khadr goes on trial Aug. 10.
They’re taking part in a military commission process Obama inherited from the Bush administration and then revised by law. With the new law, no evidence revealed through torture is permitted, and the defendants must first be classified as “unprivileged enemy belligerents.”
That means they follow no chain of command, do not wear a uniform with an insignia or follow accepted norms of war.
By pleading guilty, Qosi promised to never sue the U.S. government or challenge his detention, a key victory for people like Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Charles “Cully” Stimson, who during the Bush years was the Pentagon official overseeing Detainee Affairs.
Qosi also waived his right to be credited for the eight years he served in prison.
“It’s a victory in that he pleaded to everything he was charged with,” Stimson said. “I can’t imagine the government getting more from this deal.”
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