Bin Laden's cook pleads guilty at Guantanamo
Ibrahim al Qosi pleaded guilty to conspiring with Al-Qaeda and providing material support for terrorism, Guantanamo court spokesman Joe DellaVedova said.
Qosi, who ran the kitchen and provided supplies at Bin Laden's Star of Jihad compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, has been held at Guantanamo for more than eight years.
His sentence could range from no additional time to life imprisonment, DellaVedova said by phone from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A panel of US military officers will be assembled at Guantanamo to hear evidence and deliberate his sentence at a hearing set for Aug. 9.
The terms of his plea agreement were not disclosed but it seemed unlikely he would have pleaded guilty to both charges without some limit on his sentence.
Qosi is only the fourth captive convicted in the controversial military tribunals since the Guantanamo detention camp was opened to hold terrorism suspects in January 2002.
Two were sent home to Australia and Yemen after serving brief sentences. One other, Al-Qaeda videographer Ali Hamza al Bahlul of Yemen, remains at Guantanamo serving a life term for the same two charges Qosi pleaded guilty to.
Shortly after taking office, President Barack Obama signed an order to close the detention camp by January 2009, and said suspected terrorists should be tried in the US courts or in regular courts-martial.
But his efforts to shut down the camp have been stymied by Congress, including some members of his own Democratic Party, and his administration opted to tweak the Guantanamo court system rather than scrap it.
The detention camp still holds 181 prisoners. The Obama administration plans to try about three dozen of them either at Guantanamo or in US federal courts, including five accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, while holding 48 others indefinitely and repatriating or resettling the rest.
Qosi, 50, was charged by the US military of acting as Bin Laden's driver and bodyguard and helping the Al-Qaeda leader escape to the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan after the US-led invasion in 2001. He was also accused of being part of an Al-Qaeda mortar crew.
Qosi entered his guilty plea during a two-hour hearing, during which he admitted under oath that he provided logistical support for Al-Qaeda with the full knowledge that it was a terrorist group, DellaVedova said, Kazinform cites Arab News. See www.arabnews.com for full version.