GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, June 11 (UPI) -- A motion so secret that it can't be named is front and center at the Guantanamo Bay pretrial of a Saudi man, his attorney said.
Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a 48-year-old former millionaire from Mecca, is accused of orchestrating al-Qaida's suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen that killed 17 sailors in 2000, The Miami Herald reported.
If convicted, the prosecution proposes to execute Nashiri.
The secret government motion up for consideration in Nashiri's case has been stamped by the Pentagon as "classified" instead of having a name that reveals its content. It is the 92nd court filing in Nashiri's death-penalty case.
By the time Nashiri got to Guantanamo in 2006, CIA agents had held him at secret overseas prisons for four years where he was water boarded and interrogated, said declassified accounts.
Nashiri's Indianapolis-based defense attorney, Rick Kamen, said he had to fly to Washington just to read the secret motion.
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the Pentagon's war crimes prosecutor, said his office doesn't use secrecy to cover up embarrassing episodes but the court must engage in a balancing act between national security and the public's right to know.
