A military jury on Wednesday began deliberating sentences for an admitted war criminal at Guantánamo Bay after prosecutors and defense lawyers portrayed the detainee as, alternately, a senior member of the global Qaeda conspiracy or a battlefield commander defending Afghanistan from a US invasion.
Many of the US officers serving on the 11-member panel are veterans of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How he views the crimes of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi may affect the length of his sentence, and whether he listens to his lawyer’s pleas for clemency.
The closing arguments focused on the battlefield in Afghanistan during the war, in contrast to the more well-known court cases, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, which were described as acts of terrorism.
Mr. Hadi, 63, who was arrested in 2006, pleaded guilty in 2022. According to the terms of the agreement, he will receive a sentence in the range of 25-30 years. But he could be released to a trusted state prison, if one could be found who would give him special treatment for the crippling spinal disease that left him disabled.
Douglas J. Short, the lead prosecutor, called Mr. Hadi a “senior member of one of the most notorious conspiracies to date, Al Qaeda,” who joined the movement before the September 11 attacks and did not surrender during the war. The United States attacked. Mr Short said Mr Hadi harmed civilians in a campaign of suicide bombings and other operations in the early 2000s in Afghanistan, when the United States pursued a “hearts and minds” strategy.
He gave a timeline of the deaths of 17 US and foreign coalition troops in 2003 and 2004. He said it was a war crime, he said, because the Taliban and Qaeda forces who carried it out mingled with civilians and used unorthodox methods of warfare. such as turning civilian taxis into bombs by packing them with explosives.
“They have people who have civilian status to invite their trust, then betray that trust,” Mr. Short said, adding that Mr. Hadi had been a senior Qaeda field commander in Afghanistan and relied on the support of Osama bin Laden.
The case had been in the pretrial process for ten years, until Mr. Short’s time as a Navy reservist ran out. He continued to claim as a civilian, trading his uniform for a business suit.
During the case, the prisoner revealed that his real name was Nashwan al-Tamir, although he did not deny that he was known as Hadi, an Iraqi, when he was in Afghanistan.
In contrast, Major Lucas R. Huisenga, a defense attorney for the defendants, joined the defense team last summer. He served two tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2006, as a Marine infantryman and scout sniper, then left the service to become a lawyer.
Major Huisenga told the jury that what Mr. Hadi did “wasn’t terrorism – it was war.” Mr. Hadi “fights and kills coalition forces” using guerrilla tactics that violate the laws of war, he said.
He called his client’s crimes “serious” but said Mr Hadi had “disregarded” the rules of war and ordered his troops to spare civilians.
He described Mr. Hadi as a “broken man” who, due to spinal disease and an unsuccessful operation at Guantánamo, was in “terrible physical health” and was in constant pain. He “walked into US custody and was never going to get out of it.”
In an analogy not heard before in the 10-year-old case, the major likened Mr. Hadi’s “guerrilla warfare” to tactics used by US-backed Ukrainian forces trying to repel a Russian invasion. Major Huisenga also told the panel that Mr. Hadi had fled his native Iraq in 1990 and had been drawn to jihad in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, when US-backed anti-communist forces also used guerrilla tactics.
He described Mr. Hadi as a fighter who, after marrying an Afghan woman and having children, lived among Afghans, not in a Qaeda compound. While the Qaeda leader fled Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Hadi remained against the “occupation of his adopted homeland,” Major Huisenga said.
Members of the jury – officers of the US Army, Marines and Air Force – were flown to Guantanamo from bases around the United States and before hearing testimony from victims of attacks by Mr. Hadi’s forces and statements from detainees.
