USS Cole bombing

The Issue: After eight years, a suspect is charged. Our View: It may be hard to make the charges stick to the Guantanamo inmate. The Bush administration has charged a Guantanamo Bay detainee with murder, among other serious charges, in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is the first person to be charged with that crime in the United States. The others are in Yemen, which refuses to give them up. This trial under Bush's military-tribunal system promises to be especially challenging. Al-Nashiri was held in a secret CIA prison for almost four years and is one of three detainees the government admits to waterboarding. His attorneys will seek to have any evidence gained by coercion thrown out. And they may try to put his CIA interrogators on the stand. The government has described... [read full story]