The lawyer who wrote that brief, Wells Dixon of New York’s Center for Constitutional Rights, stood up at the war court and agreed to withdraw that lawsuit until the conclusion of Khan’s war crimes prison sentence. Judge Pohl did, however, grant Khan permission to include his treatment as a mitigating factor at his sentencing.

Under the plea deal, a military jury will hear the case and sentence Khan in 2016. The jury can order him to serve up to 40 years, after which a military judge would reduce it to at-most 25 years. A senior Pentagon official would then have the authority to suspend any or all of it. Once the sentence is over, it would be up to the Executive Branch to decide whether to keep him as a post 9/11 war-on-terror prisoner like the vast majority of the 171 captives here.

Khan becomes the seventh of the 779 captives who’ve been held at Guantánamo since 2002 to be convicted of war crimes, and the fifth through guilty plea as a means of release. He also becomes the first former CIA “high-value detainee” to be convicted at a military commission. Two other so-called high-value cases are in the war court pipeline.

Among those wounded in the Marriott bombing victim was Californian Patricia Pond, 62, who was brought in to this base for the hearing by the Pentagon. After the proceedings, she told reporters the punishment “seems fair.”

A General Electric employee from California, Pond was teaching a class for Indonesian workers at the time of the blast and was badly burned. She contracted HIV from reused needles at a Jakarta hospital in the attack’s chaotic aftermath.

“I don’t feel any anger or need for revenge against anybody.”