NEW YORK, (Reuters) – The United States transferred the first detainee from Guantanamo Bay yesterday to stand trial in a U.S. civilian court in a test case for President Barack Obama’s plans to close the controversial prison for foreign terrorism suspects.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba since 2006, pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court to charges of conspiring in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 224 people.
He had been escorted to New York by U.S. marshals, the Department of Justice said.
Bringing Ghailani to the United States and putting him on trial in a civilian court will test Obama’s contention that some of the roughly 240 detainees at the camp can be safely prosecuted and imprisoned in the United States.
Republicans have criticized the president’s plan to transfer Guantanamo suspects to the United States. “This is the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America,” House of Representatives Republican leader John Boehner said in a statement.
Civil liberties advocates say Obama should bring all Guantanamo detainees into U.S. civilian courts.
Ghailani faces 286 counts, including charges of conspiring with Osama bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda to kill Americans, and separate charges of murder for each of the 224 people killed in the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings.
Ghailani was brought into the courtroom wearing a blue jail uniform and appeared relaxed. Judge Loretta Preska asked him how he would plead, and he said, “Not guilty” in English. At other points, he spoke in Swahili through a court interpreter.
Ghailani’s military defense attorneys, Jeff Colwell and Rick Rider, said their application to assist in Ghailani’s defense is pending before the U.S. defense department.
“We hope he gets his day in court and we hope he gets a fair trial,” Colwell told reporters on the courthouse steps. “It is a good thing for the rule of law. He’s in an established court, with established procedures. Not in kind of the limbo that he’s been in for so many years.”
Ghailani was transferred three weeks after Obama laid out his plans for closing the Guantanamo camp by January 2010. The prison, long condemned by human rights groups, was opened in 2002 under President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Ghailani is charged with helping to buy a truck and oxygen and acetylene tanks used in the Tanzania bombing, and of loading boxes of TNT, detonators, and other equipment into the back of the truck in the weeks immediately before the bombing.
