Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has chosen an Army colonel with experience in handling terrorism cases — dating back to the 1986 Berlin disco bombing — to serve as chief judge of the Guantanamo war court, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.
Col. Douglas K. Watkins, 56, is currently handling hearings in the war crimes case against Guantanamo prisoner Majid Khan, a Baltimore-area high school graduate who was captured in Pakistan and held for years in CIA prisons. Khan has turned government witness and faces sentencing July 1.
Army Col. James L. Pohl had been chief judge since the Obama administration until he retired from 38 years in service last month. The brief opening meant that the war court overseer could not approve new cases, because there was no chief to assign a judge from an existing pool of military judges.
At a July hearing in the Khan case, Watkins described his 1980s service as a military policeman and Army police investigator, at one point at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie and in 1986 responding to the LaBelle nightclub bombing that killed a Turkish woman and two U.S. soldiers.
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