U.S. wants death penalty in USS Cole attack

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is charged with planning and preparing the attack on the warship USS Cole that killed 17 sailors in 2000, is pictured in this 2002 photograph.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. military prosecutors want the death penalty for a detainee being held at the Guantanamo prison camp as they reaffirmed charges against him over the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, the Pentagon said on Wednesday.

Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian national of Yemeni descent, is charged with planning and preparing the attack on the warship off Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and wounded 40.

Suicide bombers rammed an explosives-laden boat into the Cole, blowing a massive hole in its side.

The United States accuses Nashiri, captured in Dubai in 2002 and held at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of being al Qaeda's operations chief for the Arabian Peninsula.

Military prosecutors are recommending the death penalty, but that would have to be approved, the Pentagon said in a statement.

Prosecutors sent the charges to the Pentagon appointee overseeing the Guantanamo tribunals, retired Vice Admiral Bruce MacDonald, who will decide whether to refer the charges for trial and whether to prosecute it as a death penalty case.

The charges filed on Wednesday make Nashiri's the first capital case filed at Guantanamo under President Barack Obama's administration, which lifted its moratorium on new Guantanamo charges in early March.

Retired Navy Commander Kirk Lippold, who was in command of the Cole during the attack, said he supported the death penalty for Nashiri and hoped to be called as a witness at his trial.

"I am thrilled that this long overdue move for justice for the crew and families is finally happening," said Lippold, now a Republican candidate for Congress in Nevada.

Nashiri has also been charged with planning a 2002 attack on a French oil tanker off Yemen and with plotting an attack on another U.S. ship in 2000.

The charges announced against him included terrorism, murder and other crimes.

In 2008, Nashiri was charged in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal with conspiring with al Qaeda, murder and other suspected crimes. Those charges were dropped in 2009 to give the Obama administration time to review Guantanamo cases.

Obama had pledged to shut down the Guantanamo prison camp and make the civilian federal courts the preferred venue for trying prisoners. But Congress blocked those plans, forcing the administration to change course, and prosecutors have resumed filing charges in the Guantanamo tribunals.

Some evidence against Nashiri could be compromised by the CIA's admission that it used the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding on him.

CIA agents also revved a power drill close to Nashiri's head and threatened him with a gun in efforts to scare him into giving information, according to a CIA inspector general's report that was partly made public in 2009.

It was unclear where those incidents took place, but Polish prosecutors are investigating Nashiri's claims that he was tortured by interrogators at a secret CIA prison in Poland before he was moved to Guantanamo in 2006.

(Reporting by Missy Ryan in Washington and Jane Sutton in Miami; editing by Christopher Wilson)