The Bush administration has charged a Guantanamo Bay detainee with murder, among other serious charges, in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is the first person to be charged with that crime in the United States - the others are in Yemen, which refuses to give them up - and the sixth "high value" target to be charged this year. Some have accused the administration of wanting to convict a high profile detainee under Bush's military tribunal system before the president leaves office. But that would hardly seem to matter since al-Nashiri has to be tried some time.

And this trial promises to be especially challenging. Al-Nashiri was held in a secret CIA prison for almost four years and is one of three detainees the government admits to waterboarding. His attorneys say they will seek to have any evidence gained by coercion thrown out. And they may seek to put his CIA interrogators on the stand. The government has described al-Nashiri, a Saudi, of being al-Qaida's operations chief in the Persian Gulf. He has confessed to the USS Cole bombing, the bombing of a French supertanker and of plotting to bomb another U.S. destroyer, but he says he did so only to make the torture stop. "I just said those things to make the people happy. They were very happy when I told them those things," he claimed.

He admits to numerous meetings with Osama bin Laden and receiving half a million dollars. And, al-Hashiri, said he did buy explosives with the money but gave the explosives to his friends to dig wells. That's his story, anyway.

If al-Nashiri is who the government says he is, this prosecution is too important to lose. But, as a three-judge appeals court panel ruled in the case of another detainee, the government saying it's so doesn't make it so. The prosecution will have to prove it - perhaps without al-Nahsiri's confessions.

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