The Pentagon on Friday finalized death penalty charges against a Guantánamo captive accused of engineering the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, drawing the ire of critics who accused the Bush administration of trying to undermine its successor.

Abd al Rahim Nashiri, 43, could be punished by military execution if he is convicted at the remote U.S. Navy base in Cuba as an al Qaeda conspirator in the attack that killed 17 sailors.

A Bush administration appointee, Susan Crawford, approved the prosecution on Friday, said Air Force Lt. Col. Ann Knabe, a war court spokeswoman.

She said the Pentagon would make the charge sheet public later, once security officers blacked out the names of some of the Americans who were wounded in the attack.

Nashiri, born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is accused of testing explosives and equipping what looked like a small civilian garbage barge with bombs for two jihadists who appeared friendly as they came alongside the Cole.

They then detonated their boat rigged with explosives, killing themselves and blasting a 40-foot hole into what became a foundering $1 billion warship, which recently paid a port visit to South Florida.

Death penalty defense lawyer Denny LeBoeuf blasted the decision, noting that the charges were first proposed six months ago and were approved ``a month and a day before the inauguration. I think it's outrageous.''

Pentagon spokesmen said a day earlier that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had ordered his staff to research plans to close the controversial prison camps, where the U.S. now holds 250 foreign men as prisoners.

President-elect Barack Obama has pledged closure, and said he favors traditional criminal or court-martial justice over the special war court where Nashiri would be prosecuted.

LeBoeuf is director of The John Adams Project, an American Civil Liberties Union funded consortium of civil liberties lawyers defending death penalty accused at Guantánamo.

She called the timing of Friday's Nashiri announcement ill-advised, noting his case was clouded by allegations of torture in CIA custody.

'They went to Congress and said, `We waterboarded Nashiri, videotaped his interrogations and we destroyed them and lied about all of it,' '' she said. ``Now they decide to charge him, a month before this administration changes?''

War court advocates argue that judges in the special post 9/11 justice system have the authority to decide whether confessions were coerced, and should be excluded from trial.

In one instance, an Army judge threw out the confessions of Afghan detainee Mohammed Jawad, finding he was tortured. Now the Pentagon prosecutor has asked an appeals panel to restore the confessions, and will argue their case a week before inauguration.

When he announced the rough draft of the Nashiri charges in June, the war court legal advisor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, said: ``Millions and millions of documents have been gathered by the law-enforcement community, the intelligence community, and now it's taken time to gather that evidence, organize it, collate it, and prepare it.''

Hartmann has since been reassigned as operations director after three military judges excluded him from roles in war court trials because of an appearance of pro-prosecution bias.

ACLU director Anthony Romero called the timing of the Nashiri charges ``extremely suspect.''

''What we are seeing is another 11th hour stunt from the Bush administration to tie the hands of the incoming president,'' he said.

Friday's decision to press the Nashiri case at the war court, rather than let the Obama administration decide whether to prosecute him in federal court, is the latest signal that the Pentagon is trying to make good on plans to try up to 70 of the 250 men at Guantánamo.

The Pentagon did not say when Nashiri would be arraigned at Guantánamo. But but officials noted that the war court was slated to reconvene on Jan. 19, Martin Luther King Day and the eve of the inauguration.

A war court source said the court had also scheduled a Jan. 19-21 mental competency hearing in another death penalty case -- accusing Yemeni Ramzi bin al Shibh of plotting the 9/11 attacks, along with four other alleged co-conspirators.

That week is shaping up to be a busy one at the war court.

Canadian Omar Khadr's lawyers have hearings that seek to suppress evidence in his case on grounds of abusive treatment in U.S. custody, ahead of his Jan. 26 trial date -- the first to be held in the Barack Obama administration.

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