Ex-Guantanamo detainee gets life in US embassy bombings

NEW YORK - A US judge Tuesday sentenced former Guantanamo detainee Ahmed Ghailani to life in prison for his role in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

Judge Lewis Kaplan also ordered Ghailani to pay nearly $34 million in legal fees to the US District Court in Lower Manhattan and compensation to families of the victims, which included 12 Americans working in the two embassies. A total of 224 people died in the bombings, which Kaplan called “horrific.”

Ghailani’s lawyers were court-appointed and he has requested US assistance in filing an appeal to the sentence, which Kaplan said must be made within 14 days.

The simultaneous bomb attacks in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam Aug 7, 1998 also injured thousands of people. Some of the injured as well as families of the dead were present in the court and spoke on behalf of others who could not be present. They were allowed to tell the court of their physical and mental suffering as well as losses of loved ones.

“Life means life,” Kaplan said after pronouncing the sentence and rejecting the defence lawyers’ repeated appeals for leniency.

Ghailani sat through the 2 1/2-hour court session expressionless, dressed in a white jumpsuit over a red shirt. He refused, through his lawyer, to make a final statement when urged by Kaplan before the sentencing.

A jury last year found Ghailani guilty of one only count of “knowing and willing participation” in the bombings of the US embassies and exonerated him of 284 other counts sought by US prosecutors. Ghailani’s defence lawyers had requested Kaplan toss out the one-count verdict.

Defence lawyers asked Kaplan to disregard sentencing guidelines and take into account the time Ghailani had already spent in US detention and his alleged torture during CIA interrogations.

The lawyers said he provided information related to terrorist activities in East Africa in the 1990s that benefited the US’ anti-terror campaign.

But Kaplan retorted, “In light of all these, there is a clear intent to kill. The bombs that he built were intended to destroy the US embassies.”

“He caused a thousand fold more pain on innocent people compared to claims of mistreatment by the US government,” Kaplan said, adding that the crime committed by Ghailani was “horrific” and “profoundly reckless.”

Kaplan said Ghailani conspired to carry out a “cold-blooded killing and maiming of innocent people on an enormous scale of death and destruction”.

Kaplan said it was “true” that Ghailani was tortured during detention in CIA-run camps after he was arrested in Pakistan in 2004 until he was sent to the US Navy Base at Guantanamo Bay’s detention centre.

Ghailani was transferred to New York in 2009 for the first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee as part of US President Barack Obama’s policy to close the detention centre.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the sentence demonstrates the ability of the civilian court system to handle terrorism cases.

“Federal courts are not only the right place but the most effective place to prosecute terrorism suspects,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project.

“As the Obama administration reportedly considers prosecuting some terrorism suspects in the illegitimate military commissions, we hope it will heed the lesson of the Ghailani case federal courts work, military commissions don’t.”

Kaplan said he had no authority to rule whether the CIA torture of Ghailani was illegal, as claimed by defence lawyers.

The defence said Ghailani was tricked into the plot and asked Kaplan to depart from the harsh sentencing guidelines, which in the case of multiple murders call for a lengthy jail sentence.

Kaplan said evidence of the attacks on the US embassies “all support an inference of knowing and willing participation in the conspiracy”.

The US argued Ghailani was part of the Al Qaeda terrorist cell operating in East Africa in the 1990s and personally planned the bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam, including the purchase of trucks and explosives to attack the embassies.