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Yemeni `confesses' to plotting attacks against US targets

A Yemeni portrayed as an al-Qaeda operative and a member of a terrorist family confessed to plotting the bombings of the a US Navy warship and two US embassies in Africa, attacks that killed hundreds, a Pentagon transcript of a Guantanamo Bay hearing showed.

The transcript released on Monday was the fourth from closed hearings the military is holding for 14 "high value" terror suspects who were kept in secret CIA prisons before they were sent to the US facility in Cuba last fall.

Last week, Waleed bin Attash said he helped plan the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 200 people, the transcript showed.

He also said he helped organize the 2000 attack on the US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole, in which suicide bombers steered an explosives-laden boat into the warship and caused an explosion that knocked a hole in the ship's hull and killed 17 sailors.

"I participated in the buying or purchasing of the explosives," bin Attash said when asked what his role was in the attacks. "I put together the plan for the operation a year and a half prior to the operation, buying the boat and recruiting the members that did the operation."

Also alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard at one time, bin Attash is in his late 20s and is a Yemeni who was born and reared in Saudi Arabia, authorities have said. Said to have been an operational chief for the al-Qaeda network, bin Attash is known as Tawfiq bin Attash or Tawfiq Attash Khallada or simply Khallad. He was captured in 2003.

US intelligence documents allege that bin Attash is a "scion of a prominent terrorist family" that includes his father, Mohammed, who was close to bin Laden, and younger brother Hassan, who has been a prisoner since 2004 at Guantanamo, where he arrived at age 17.

Several brothers attended al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s and two have been killed, US officials say.

Bin Attash told a hearing on March 12 that he met with the man who did the embassy bombings just a few hours before the operation began, the transcript released by the US Department of Defense showed.

"I was the link between Osama bin Laden and his deputy," bin Attash said.

Bin Attash also said he was with bin Laden when the Cole was attacked while refueling in Yemen's port of Aden.

Legal experts have criticized the US decision to bar independent observers from the hearings, called combatant status review tribunals.

Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, said "legitimate criticisms can be raised" about the confessions coming out of the hearings.

"Of course, no one's there to know, other than what we see from the transcripts and what the hearing officers hear," Tobias said.
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