Rare Battlefield War Crimes Case Reaches Sentencing Phase at Guantánamo Bay

An Iraqi prisoner admitted to conspiring with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. But his case is an outlier at the Guantánamo court.

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Bill Eggers, along with his daughter Maris Lebid, at a memorial in Florida dedicated to his son Capt. Daniel W. Eggers. They traveled to Guantánamo Bay to witness the war crimes sentencing of the man who killed Captain Eggers in 2004.

Twenty years ago, when the Eggers family of Cape Coral, Fla., got the devastating news that their eldest son had been killed in Afghanistan, they did what Gold Star families do.

They buried him at Arlington National Cemetery. They listened as an Army priest described his last battlefield confession. They mourned with President George W. Bush, the commander in chief, and they faithfully honored him each Memorial Day.

This week, the father and sister of Capt. Daniel W. Eggers, a Green Beret, are honoring him in a different way. They are at Guantánamo Bay to represent him at the sentencing trial of a former commander of enemy insurgents in Afghanistan.

Captain Eggers was 28 when he was killed and on his second tour in Afghanistan. He had immersed himself in Afghan food and culture, and spoke Pashto. “He was a very humble gentleman,” Bill Eggers, his father, said in a recent interview. He grew up aspiring to join the Army as far back as anyone could remember and truly believed in “God, family, country,” his father said.

In a plea agreement two years ago, the insurgent leader, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, admitted to commanding the fighters who planted and armed the pressure-activated mine that killed Captain Eggers and three other members of the U.S. Special Forces. There had been a firefight, and the American commandos were in pursuit of what they believed to be fleeing Taliban when their Humvee tripped the explosion.

The case is an outlier at the Guantánamo court, which was created after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and considers the globe to be the battlefield in the war on terrorism. Mr. Hadi’s case takes a more traditional view of warfare and the combat zone. In pleading guilty, Mr. Hadi agreed that some of the tactics his Taliban and Qaeda forces used to fight the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 constituted war crimes.

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