How Locking Hambali in Gitmo Denied His Victims Closure

Nasir Abas was a leader in Jamaah Islamiyah. Now he wants his former friend, the mastermind of multiple bombings, put on trial. It won't ever happen 

Edited by Sam Thielman

JAKARTA, Indonesia—It turns out my translator on my reporting trip here is the single most important person ever to defect from Jamaah Islamiyah, which a generation ago was al-Qaeda's most important ally in Southeast Asia.

I'm halfway around the world so I can interview survivors of the August 2003 J.W. Marriott International Hotel bombing, which features in my forthcoming book THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN. Assisting me is Nasir Abas, a crisp-dressing, late-middle-aged Malaysian-born citizen of Indonesia. 

Nasir knows the world I'm writing about first-hand. He's a veteran of the 1980s Afghanistan jihad who then rose through the ranks of Jamaah Islamiyah in the 1990s. Back then, Nasir's goal was to build an Islamic state in the various parts of the southwestern Pacific Rim where millions of Muslims live. He describes the Jamaah Islamiyah he joined as an "Islamic movement"—distinguishing it, and himself, from the terrorist organization it became. 

One of the men who transformed Jamaah Islamiyah into a blood-soaked militia was the man known as Hambali, its military commander. Hambali masterminded not only the Marriott bombing, but the far more lethal October 2002 Bali nightclub attacks, which claimed the lives of over 200 people. "He was a good guy," Nasir says, getting my attention. "Always helping people." 

Around 1999, Nasir explains, Hambali became "infected by the ideologies of the statement from Osama bin Laden." That made Hambali flexible when it came to the ethics of murdering civilians in the pursuit of jihad. Nasir, like a normal person, found that repellent. In 2000, Hambali offered Nasir, by then a regional commander in Jamaah Islamiyah, money to bomb a church in Kota Kinabalu, a state capital in Malaysia. When Nasir balked, Hambali cited bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war to him, in an attempt to demonstrate the permissibility of attacking the church. 

"I said, I cannot do this, it's wrong. And he blamed me, he said, 'How dare you not accept Osama bin Laden! He's a big mujahid, a person who assisted the mujahideen in Afghanistan!'" Nasir recalls. "I said, I respect Osama bin Laden, because he helped the Muslims in Afghanistan, but for this statement, to order the Muslims to kill civilians, I can't accept this. In Islam, we're not allowed to kill civilians on a battlefield. And we're supposed to kill civilians off a battlefield? We can't do that. So me and Hambali had a difference of opinion about that." 

That tremendous understatement was the beginning of the end of Nasir's time with Jamaah Islamiyah. But shortly after the time of the Bali bombings—in which, he writes in his book Inside Jamaah Islamiyah, his brother-in-law took part, as did some of his former students—Indonesian authorities detained Nasir. He began working with them, and assisted in a police reconstruction of the Marriott attacks ahead of the perpetrators' trial. It began a whole new life and career path for Nasir. He formally quit Jamaah Islamiyah in 2003. The group itself disbanded in the fall of 2024.

Hambali, meanwhile, was captured by the CIA and tortured in the black sites. In 2006, he was transferred to Guantanamo, and, many years later, charged in the military commissions. You can read my friend Carol Rosenberg's explainer about Hambali's commission here. 

But more than 20 years after the Bali and Jakarta attacks, there is still no trial date set for Hambali. And even if at some point the commissions manage to get through the pre-trial hearings, they will be at Guantanamo, not in Indonesia, and before a military tribunal, not a court of law. That means there will never be a trial for Hambali. The Indonesian statute of limitations has passed. 

A little more than a month ago, Indonesia's human-rights minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra said the government had an obligation to "care" for Hambali as an Indonesian citizen. That marked the abandonment of a longstanding official disavowal of Hambali's citizenship, and accordingly sparked speculation about his repatriation from Guantanamo. Should Hambali ever leave Guantanamo, Mahendra's comments suggested he would be a free man. 

That doesn't sit right with Nasir, regardless of their former friendship. Little about Hambali's arrest and detention does. "He was never arrested in Indonesia," Nasir observes. When the CIA's allies arrested Hambali in Thailand, sending him back to Indonesia was never an option—something that, again, the Indonesian government was fine with until recently. But Abas argues that Hambali should have had to face Indonesian justice: "He's responsible for what he did, in Indonesia." The black sites and Guantanamo, "that's not a judge. That's not a trial." 

Nasir and I are seated around a cafe table in Jakarta's Cilandak Town Square with two survivors of the Marriott bombing, 69-year old Tony Soemarno and his former co-worker, 48-year old Febby Firmansiyah. Tony and Febby suffered life-changing wounds that afternoon 22 years ago, and accordingly also want to see Hambali convicted in Indonesia. Or, given the way events turned out, maybe the more accurate way to put it is that they wanted to have seen Hambali convicted in Indonesia. 

Understandably agitated, Tony thinks out loud about what he thinks Hambali deserves. First he goes with the death penalty, then settles on life in prison. Febby agrees with that. "He's not only a killer, he's evil," Tony says. "He was the one who motivated people," Nasir adds. 

Lower-level Jamaah Islamiyah fighters who participated in the Marriott attacks were tried, convicted, served their terms and are now free. When I observe that Hambali would be a free man today had he been among them, Nasir doesn't hesitate to agree, untroubled. Because it would have meant a trial, which would have meant justice, which would have meant closure. 

Instead, the CIA treated Hambali as an intelligence opportunity and, I think it's fair to say, a subject for physical revenge. The last thing the agency was thinking of was what it would mean to deny closure to Hambali's victims, in whose name the CIA was ostensibly acting. Entailed in the CIA's torture of Hambali was the presumption that those victims would be satisfied with brutality. 

Every now and again, when the Guantanamo military commissions briefly return to the media landscape, critics of the process tend to observe that the commissions and the torture have denied closure to the 9/11 victims and their loved ones. They're correct. But looking Febby, Tony and Nasir in the face makes vividly clear that the commissions and the torture also denied closure to many others around the world. The War on Terror treated their suffering as another bloody shirt to wave. Once waving it had served its purpose, the U.S. would never think about them ever again. 

THE CEASEFIRE IN GAZA HAS GIVEN WAY to a new phase of total Israeli siege. That siege is typically shorthanded to a denial of "humanitarian aid," but that term, to my ears, sanitizes what's happening. The Israeli government is denying the entry into Gaza of any basic resource necessary for sustaining life. And as FOREVER WARS predicted all the way back in June, it's doing this to avoid negotiating an actual end to the war, through what's called the "phase two" process. 

As has often been the case since the post-October 7 genocide began, Hamas is not the rejectionist party when it comes to the diplomatic track. Hamas wanted to extend the agreed-upon ceasefire plan to its crucial second phase, as Israel had insincerely agreed (again: predicted) when it accepted the ceasefire in January. Instead, President Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, put forward a different plan that reneges on proceeding to phase two, and ceases to obligate Israel to release Palestinian hostages/prisoners. Hamas rejected that. I say all this because American media accounts of this weekend's events that I've seen obscure this basic political reality—one that returns the Palestinians of Gaza to the crosshairs of Israel.  

AS I WAS FLYING HOME FROM JAKARTA, the Trump/Vance-Zelensky blowup happened. I have no idea if it was a preplanned ambush or not. But what's clear is they're trying to usher Zelensky—the guy who in 2019 refused to "do us a favor," recall—out of office, after which they'll seek a more pliable Ukrainian leader who'll more readily accept Russian negotiating terms and American resource exploitation. And parochial as it is, I was put in mind of this just-published panel from IRON MAN #5:

Maybe for the collected edition, I can convince Marvel to let me add "Like Zelensky." 

HERE'S A RECENT BUDGET BREAKDOWN I FOUND CLARIFYING: the National Priorities Project's Lindsay Koshgarian finds that the amount of money obligated in Pentagon contracts eclipses the budget of every federal agency involved in discretionary spending. 

I THOUGHT OF THIS CRIMETHINC ESSAY from after the November elections when I read in Politico that once again the Democratic consultant class recommends purging the left and further courting the oligarchy. Or, as the consultants put it, "mov[ing] away from the dominance of small-dollar donors." As with the Republicans, the Democratic abandonment of working-class interests invariably comes packaged as an embrace of working-class voters. Only this system doesn't answer to voters, it answers to donors. Does this seem like a party that deserves a future? (I see my friend Sana Saaed has thoughts on this question from different angles.)

YOU'LL NEVER GUESS who stands valiantly at the ready to profit off mass deportation. 

GOODBYE TO DAVID JOHANSEN, the legendary singer of the New York Dolls and the greatest artist produced by Staten Island to never have been a member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Reader, I went to the 2005 (or 2006?) New York Dolls reunion shows, and even in his advanced age, he still had it. Sylvain Sylvain (also RIP) used to call him David So Handsome, and he gave it right back to Syl during between-song-banter that "what we had in that dressing room all those years ago was not sex." Then they played "You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory" to honor Johnny Thunders. RIP David Johansen. Morrissey is not and has never been your fault. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.