Prosecutors for Guantanamo Bay Military Commission Add Conspiracy to Charge Against Detainee (February 10, 2014) [1]
On February 10, 2014, prosecutors for the military commission trials at Guantanamo Bay added a charge [3] of conspiracy against Abd al Hadi al-Iraqi, an alleged high-level emissary with al-Queda. He is already charged with various terrorism-related charges. According to the news story [4], this new charge sets up “a test of whether Congress has the power to make a conspiracy a prosecutable offense in a war-crimes tribunal, despite the offense not being recognized as an international war crime.” The conspiracy charge [3] arose from a situation in which [5] al-Iraqi was a member of al-Qaeda’s ruling Shura Council, worked as an instructor in an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, was a known and trusted ally of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and worked directly on targeting U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.