A Saudi prisoner accused of plotting Al Qaeda’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole warship in 2000 has signed an offer to plead guilty to avoid a death-penalty trial, his lawyer announced Monday.
The lawyer, Allison F. Miller, made the disclosure at the start of a two-week hearing in the war crimes case while describing an atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty at her Pentagon office over expected staff and budget cuts.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth would be considering the offer under the current formula for the military commission system. But Ms. Miller said a military chain of command has yet to send it to him.
The defendant, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 60, sat silently with his legal team, at times swiveling in his chair, while Ms. Miller described the pretrial agreement, as the plea offer is called.
Mr. Nashiri, who has been in U.S. custody since 2002, is charged in the longest-running death penalty case at Guantánamo Bay. Two suicide bombers blew up a bomb-laden skiff alongside the Cole during a refueling stop in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000. Mr. Nashiri is accused of helping to orchestrate the attack, which killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded dozens of others.
Ms. Miller made the disclosure in a bid to suspend the proceedings at least until September 2026 to work on resolving the plea offer or, in the alternative, prepare for trial. The judge has scheduled the trial to begin on Oct. 6, days before the 25th anniversary of the attack.
Prosecutors have struggled to bring the case to trial since Mr. Nashiri’s arraignment in 2011. The reasons for the delay include challenges to the evidence, a walkout by a defense team and a decision by a judge to exclude Mr. Nashiri’s confessions as tainted by torture.
In that time, parents of sailors who were killed in the attack have passed away and many victims have stopped traveling to the Navy base to watch the painfully slow pretrial proceedings.
On Monday, only James G. Parlier, a retired Navy command master chief who survived the attack, was observing the proceedings. For years, he had bristled at the delays and pressed for a capital trial. But on Monday he said he had come to support resolving it through a plea agreement, at the risk of angering some of his former shipmates.
“We’ve got to close that chapter of our lives,” Command Master Chief Parlier said. “There are others who feel the same as me, want to get on with it. I know even if there’s going to be a death sentence we’ll be old men or dead by then.”
He said he had been told that the proposed sentencing range would be 20 years to life imprisonment, and “I’m fine with that.” By the time the sentence ended, he noted, Mr. Nashiri would be over 80.
A separate filing asks the judge to suspend the case until July 4, 2026, or until after a sweeping effort by Elon Musk to downsize the federal work force “finishes dismantling the federal government, the Defense Department and the Military Commissions Defense Organization, whichever were to happen sooner.”
Ms. Miller described an atmosphere of anxiety, distraction and disruption in her staff’s ability to prepare for a trial, in part because the Trump administration has canceled the contracts of some new members of her team whose hirings were underway at the time of the presidential transition. Other team members who are on probationary status or whose contracts are expiring are awaiting word on whether their jobs will be eliminated.
Defense lawyers have asked to call Mr. Hegseth, Mr. Musk, the director of the office of military commissions and others to testify on the personnel and policy changes.
Military prosecutors objected and will argue against their testimony later in the hearings.
Ms. Miller described the guilty plea offer as caught up in the transition between the Biden and Trump administrations. After Mr. Nashiri and his defense team signed the document on Dec. 12, Ms. Miller said, she brought the offer to Rear Adm. Aaron C. Rugh, the chief prosecutor for military commissions. But he declined to present it to then Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, she said.
The judge, Col. Matthew S. Fitzgerald, acknowledged the political climate. “We all realize we are operating in dynamic circumstances,” he said.
In the war court system, plea agreements are made between a defendant and the overseer of the military commissions, who is called a convening authority. Traditionally, the secretary of defense has delegated that authority to a lawyer.
But last year Mr. Austin took control of the plea agreements after retired Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, a former career Army lawyer he put in charge of the court, made a deal in the Sept. 11 case. That authority passed to Mr. Hegseth when he became defense secretary under President Trump.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Capt. Timothy J. Stinson, a Navy lawyer, declined to comment on whether he had endorsed the agreement. Ms. Miller said in court that he had.
