Washington – A Yemeni portrayed as an al-Qaeda operative and a member of a terrorist family has confessed to plotting the bombings of the USS Cole and two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing hundreds, according to a Pentagon transcript of a Guantanamo Bay hearing.
The transcript released Monday was the fourth from the hearings the military is holding in private for 14 “high-value” terrorist suspects who were kept in secret CIA prisons before they were sent to the U.S. facility in Cuba last fall.
Last week, Waleed bin Attash said he helped plan the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people, according to the transcript. He also said he helped organize the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in which suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into the guided-missile destroyer, killing 17 sailors.
“I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives,” bin Attash said. “I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation, buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation.”
Captured in 2003
Also alleged to have been Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard at one time, bin Attash is in his late 20s and is a Yemeni who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, authorities have said. Said to be an al-Qaeda operational chief, bin Attash is known as Tawfiq bin Attash or Tawfiq Attash Khallada or simply Khallad. He was captured in 2003.
Bin Attash told a March 12 hearing that he met with the man who did the embassy bombings just a few hours before the operation took place, according to the transcript released by the Defense Department.
“I was the link between Osama bin Laden and his deputy Sheikh Abu Hafsd Al Masri,” who took over the leadership of al-Qaeda in Iraq after its leader, Abu Mu sab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike last June.
Bin Attash also said he was with bin Laden when the Cole was attacked while refueling in Yemen’s port of Aden.
Criticisms voiced
Legal experts have criticized the U.S. decision to bar independent observers from the hearings, called combatant status review tribunals. Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, said “legitimate criticisms can be raised” about the confessions coming out of the hearings.
“Of course, no one’s there to know, other than what we see from the transcripts and what the hearing officers hear,” Tobias said.
The hearings are being held to determine whether the suspects should be declared “enemy combatants” who can be held indefinitely and prosecuted by military tribunals. If, as expected, the 14 are declared enemy combatants, they could then be charged and tried under the military-commissions law signed by President Bush in October.
