A former al Qaeda cook who pleaded guilty to war crimes at Guantánamo could go home to Sudan in the summer of 2012, under a secret deal just approved by a senior Pentagon official and made public Wednesday by the Defense Department.
Ibrahim al Qosi, 50, is the first Guantánamo captive to reach a war court settlement during the Obama administration.
A military jury gave him a symbolic 14-year sentence this summer, unaware of the secret plea deal that let the Sudanese man admit to conspiring with al Qaeda and providing material support for the terror group in exchange for a two-year sentence. He has already spent nine years in U.S. military custody, mostly at Guantánamo.
Retired Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the senior Pentagon overseer of the Military Commissions, had the power to reduce the sentence even further.
Instead, MacDonald stuck to the original plea agreement, in war court documents released by the Defense Department late Wednesday. Qosi is currently segregated in a maximum-security prison at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba, in a cellblock reserved for war criminals after years classified as a “complaint captive” in a communal camp where prisoners ate, slept and prayed together in barracks. His lawyers had filed a clemency request protesting his isolated SuperMax-style prison conditions.
"He was moved to a facility where he was placed in a solitary cell; there is nothing in that cell but a bed, a sink, and a toilet,'' wrote his Pentagon defense attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier in a brief filed Jan. 14.
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