The Obama administration may now be forced to rely on military tribunals to try "war on terror" suspects after a New York jury cleared the first ex-Guantanamo inmate brought to a civilian court of almost all charges, experts said Thursday.
"The verdict has offered a vision of the nightmare scenario - acquittal in a terrorism case involving a high value detainee - and that vision will be enough to ramp up the already intense pressure not to try something like this again," said legal expert Benjamin Wittes from the Brookings Institution. Tanzanian national Ahmed Ghailani, 36, was on Wednesday acquitted of all but one of the 286 charges brought against him after the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
He faces up to life in prison after being found guilty of conspiracy against US property in the attacks which killed 224 people and injured thousands more. But Wittes said Ghailani's final sentence, which could be the mandatory minimum of 20 years in jail, will fail to quell the political storm about future trials of other suspects - including the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks and his four alleged co-plotters.
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