A Guantánamo military court heard anguishing testimony at the sentencing hearing for two Malaysian prisoners who pleaded guilty after 20 years of detention.
Relatives of tourists killed in the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali, Indonesia, spoke of endless, devastating grief, and two prisoners who conspired in the attack renounced violence in the name of Islam on Thursday for a U.S. military jury assembled at Guantánamo Bay to deliberate their sentence.
The prisoners, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin and Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, both Malaysians, pleaded guilty last week to war crimes charges for conspiring with an affiliate of Al Qaeda that carried out the attack. The bombings killed 202 people from 22 nations.
“No God of any religion rewards such acts of horror,” said Solomon Lamagni-Miller, 18, of London. He was born after his uncle, Nathaniel Dan Miller, 31, was killed in the bombing and read a statement written by the victim’s mother, his grandmother.
Christopher Snodgrass of Glendale, Ariz., said the loss of his daughter, Deborah, 33, in the bombing and other “terrorist activities worldwide” left him despising “over 20 percent of the world population, Muslims. I’m a religious person, and the hate-filled person I have become is certainly not what I wanted.”
Echoing the sentiment of several family members, he appealed to the jury to “deal with these murderers in such a manner that they can’t do to others as they’ve done to us.”
For hours this week, fathers, mothers, a brother and three sisters of the victims offered anguished descriptions of searches for missing relatives, of life-altering burns and of the vacuum left by the deaths of young people who had gone on vacation in Bali and never came home.
Two of Mr. Bin Amin’s elder brothers tearfully asked the jury for leniency. Then both defendants renounced their terrorist pasts, apologized to the families and said they were tortured while in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prison network from 2003 to 2006.
The men were captured in Thailand in June 2003. A U.S. military jury is hearing the case to decide a sentence in the 20- to 25-year range, and cannot grant credit for time served. There is, however, a secondary, secret agreement in which the men could return to Malaysia later this year.
Mr. Bin Amin’s brothers flew in from Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, and sat in the public portion of the spectators’ gallery, where a blue curtain separated relatives of the dead from the United States, Britain and Germany.
The oldest brother, Fadil, 62, an architect who was educated in Birmingham, England, sorrowfully told the court that his mother taught all 10 of her children a peaceful form of Islam. “He somehow got sidetracked” and made bad choices, he said.
In the gallery sat Matthew Arnold, who traveled to Guantánamo from his home in Birmingham and testified that his brother Timothy, 43, was in Bali for a rugby tournament when he was killed “by this atrocity.”
“My family’s lives have been changed completely by the actions of the perpetrators of this crime,” he said. “And I would like the court and Mr. Bin Amin, and Mr. Bin Lep, to be aware of the devastating effects of their actions on so many innocent and decent people.”
Mr. Bin Amin, who hung his head at the defense table throughout the hours of testimony, apologized to the victims, his family and “all Muslims. This is not what I was taught as a child,” he said.
In his two decades of U.S. detention, he said, “I have changed. I am not an angry young man anymore. I am a reformed man. My faith has evolved.”
As part of their plea deal, both men offered secret testimony earlier this week for the future war crimes trial of Encep Nurjaman, a prisoner known as Hambali whom prosecutors portray as a mastermind of terrorist attacks in Indonesia in 2002 and 2003. But both men said in their confessions that they had no firsthand knowledge of Mr. Hambali’s role in the attack.
On Thursday, Mr. Bin Amin went further.
“I didn’t know anything about the Bali bombing until after it happened,” he said, describing his role in the plot as helping some of the perpetrators after the bombing and assisting in money transfers that could be used for other attacks.
He showed drawings he made of himself being tortured, which were recently declassified to show the jury.
Col. George C. Kraehe, the case prosecutor, did not object to the artwork that showed Mr. Bin Amin nude, hooded, shackled in painful positions and at one point held spread-eagle on a plastic tarp by masked guards, with one pouring water into his nose and mouth.
Christine A. Funk, Mr. Bin Amin’s lawyer, said the artwork display was to help the jury “in weighing appropriate punishment.”
Mr. Bin Lep said he did not want the legacy of torture “to define who I am.”
Also, he said, “I forgive the people who tortured me.”
He admitted to his crimes. “I am guilty of my role in the Bali bombing,” he said.
He described himself as “young, immature and stubborn” when he was drawn to Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001 to train with Al Qaeda.
“All I wish for now is peace,” he said. “I wish that peace for everyone here, but especially the victims and their families.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
