A military jury began sentencing deliberations Wednesday for the confessed war criminal at Guantanamo Bay, after the prosecution and defense alternately portrayed the prisoner as a senior figure in a global al Qaeda conspiracy or a battlefield commander defending Afghanistan from a U.S. invasion.
Many of the 11-member panel's U.S. military officers are veterans of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. How they view Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi's crimes could affect the length of his sentence and whether they listen to his lawyers' requests to recommend clemency.
Closing arguments focused on the wartime battlefields of Afghanistan, as opposed to the court's better-known cases, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2000 USS Cole bombing, which are portrayed as acts of terrorism.
Hadi, 63, was arrested in 2006 and pleaded guilty in 2022. Under the terms of the agreement, he faces 25 to 30 years in prison. But he could be released and detained in a trusted country if it can find him specialized treatment for the paralyzing spinal condition that has left him disabled.
Lead prosecutor Douglas J. Short called Hadi “a senior figure in one of the most notorious conspiracies of all time, al Qaeda,” and said he joined the group before the Sept. 11 attacks and refused to give up the fight when the U.S. invaded. Short said Hadi endangered civilians in Afghanistan in the early 2000s as the U.S. pursued its “Hearts and Minds” strategy with suicide bombings and other operations.
He presented a timeline of the deaths of 17 U.S. and foreign coalition soldiers in 2003 and 2004. He said these were war crimes because the Taliban and al-Qaida forces who carried out these killings blended in with civilians and used unorthodox warfare methods, such as packing explosives into civilian taxis and turning them into bombs.
“Hadi posed as a civilian to his subordinates in order to elicit their trust, then betrayed that trust,” Short said, adding that Hadi served as al-Qaida's senior field commander in Afghanistan and relied on Osama bin Laden for support.
The case has been in pretrial proceedings for 10 years, long enough for Short's term as a Navy Reserve officer to end, after he traded in his military uniform for a business suit and continued the lawsuit as a civilian.
During the course of the trial, the defendant revealed that his real name was Nashwan al-Tamir, but did not dispute that he was known as Iraqi Hadi while in Afghanistan.
In contrast, defense attorney Lucas R. Huizenga, who joined the defense team last summer, served two tours in Iraq as a Marine infantryman and scout sniper from 2003 to 2006 before leaving the military to become a lawyer.
Major Huisenga told the jury that Hadi's actions “were not terrorism but war”, and that he “fought and killed coalition forces” using guerilla tactics in violation of the laws of war.
He called his client's crimes “grave” but said Hadi had not completely “abandoned” the rules of war and had instructed his soldiers to help civilians.
He described Hadi as a “broken man” who was in “terrible shape” and in constant pain due to a spinal condition and a botched operation at Guantanamo. “He will walk into a US detention facility and never walk out.”
In an analogy never before heard for the decade-old incident, the major likened Hadi's “guerilla warfare” to tactics used by U.S.-backed Ukrainian forces as they tried to repel a Russian invasion. Huissenga also said Hadi fled his native Iraq in 1990 and was drawn to the jihad in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, when U.S.-backed anti-Communist forces also used guerilla tactics.
Huissenga described Hadi as a fighter who married an Afghan woman, had children with her and lived among Afghans rather than in an al-Qaida compound. When al-Qaida leaders fled Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, Hadi stayed behind to fight “the occupation of our adopted homeland,” he said.
The jury, made up of Army, Marine and Air Force officers, was flown to Guantanamo from bases across the country to hear advance testimony from victims of attacks by Hadi's military and statements from prisoners.
