Pentagon rejects USS Cole plea deal, setting first Guantánamo death penalty trial for June 2026

AAAbd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a 61-year-old Saudi national, has been held at Guantánamo Bay since September 2006. He was captured in the United Arab Emirates in October 2002, held in CIA black sites in Thailand, Poland, and other undisclosed locations for nearly four years, then transferred to Guantánamo with 13 other 'high-value detainees' in September 2006.

He was first charged in December 2008, those charges were dropped under Obama in February 2009, and he was re-indicted in April 2011. Since then, the military commission has spent 15 years in pretrial proceedings, working through the evidentiary and legal wreckage left by his torture.

The Oct. 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole was one of al-Qaeda's most operationally significant attacks before Sept. 11. Two suicide bombers steered a small explosives-laden skiff alongside the destroyer as it refueled in Aden harbor, Yemen, detonating it and tearing a 40-by-60-foot hole in the ship's port side.

Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed — the deadliest attack on a U.S. naval vessel since the 1987 Iraqi Exocet missile strike on the USS Stark. The bombing foreshadowed the Sept. 11 attacks and remains one of the most significant acts of international terrorism against American military personnel in the post-Cold War era.

Al-Nashiri's time in CIA black sites from 2002 to 2006 is the defining legal fact of this prosecution. CIA officers and contractors subjected him to waterboarding, rectal abuse, sleep deprivation, and were documented threatening him with a power drill and a handgun.

A Navy reserve doctor who examined him later described him as 'one of the most severely traumatized individuals I have ever seen.'

His then-case supervisor was GHGina Haspel — who later became CIA director under Trump's first term. In August 2023, military judge Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. issued a 50-page ruling excluding al-Nashiri's 2007 confessions — made to a so-called 'clean team' of non-torture interrogators at Guantánamo — as still tainted by the prior torture, because those confessions were the direct product of his cooperation originally compelled by waterboarding.

The prosecution now faces trial without its most probative evidence

Having lost the confession suppression battle, prosecutors will rely on U.S. agents who investigated the bombing on the ground in Yemen in October 2000, financial transaction records tracing money to al-Nashiri's alias, documents showing he helped acquire vessels, explosives, and safe houses for the bombers, and the testimony of survivors

Al-Nashiri's defense attorney Allison F Miller said he will 'air the horrors perpetrated against Mr. al-Nashiri by the American government' — meaning the trial will include extensive testimony about CIA torture techniques, their documentation, and their effects on al-Nashiri's psychological state.

The decision to reject the plea was made not by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth but by Deputy Defense Secretary SFSteve Feinberg, to whom Hegseth delegated authority over the military commissions. Feinberg is a private equity billionaire who co-founded Cerberus Capital Management, which manages approximately $60 billion in assets.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, he refused to acknowledge that Russia had invaded Ukraine and expressed support for large-scale Defense Department firings — positions that gave Democrats little leverage to block him. The Biden-era Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had also rejected a plea deal in this case in 2024, suggesting this is a pattern of political leadership overruling prosecutors across both administrations, not a purely partisan decision.

The USS Cole case is the longest-running capital case in Guantánamo's history and a bellwether for the military commissions system. Only 11 men have been successfully prosecuted through the entire Guantánamo military commission system since it was established after Sept. 11 — three of those verdicts have been overturned on appeal.

The Sept. 11 case, involving five defendants including KSKhalid Sheikh Mohammed, has been in pretrial proceedings since 2012 and still has no trial date, in part because similar torture-derived evidence problems have never been resolved. If the al-Nashiri trial ends in acquittal or a successful torture-based suppression of remaining evidence, it could further undermine confidence in the military commissions' ability to deliver justice in high-value cases.

PAPaul Abney, a retired Navy master chief who survived the Cole bombing, told reporters he had supported the plea bargain. 'It's been a long, drawn-out process.

I'd just like to see an end to this, to get some accountability and give some finality to this thing.' He said he would attend the trial at Guantánamo.

His testimony illustrates the genuine division among victims' families and survivors: some prioritize finality and accountability through a certain conviction; others want the death penalty that only a trial can produce. Neither the plea deal nor the trial can give families back what the attack took from them 26 years ago.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin June 1, 2026, with the trial expected to last six months. The proceeding will take place in the specialized military courtroom at Guantánamo Naval Station. It will be the first death penalty trial ever held in the military commission system — a historic and fraught proceeding that will unfold in the same facility where the defendant has been held for 20 years, before a panel of military officers who will decide both guilt and, if al-Nashiri is convicted, whether he should be executed or imprisoned for life.