Omar Kadr and more

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Detainment of Teen Still Draws Protests
28/12/2008

Trial begins next month at Gitmo for Canadian, now 22, who is accused of killing U.S. soldier

By CAROL J. WILLIAMS

Los Angeles Times

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Two days after he was pulled unconscious from the rubble of a bombed al-Qaida compound in southern Afghanistan, 15-year-old Omar Khadr lay strapped to a gurney, his left eye blinded by shrapnel, gunshot wounds to his back still raw.

U.S. agents who conducted the first interrogation of the Canadian teenager at Bagram Air Base near Kabul on July 29, 2002, gauged the effects of their questioning by the blood-pressure meter attached to him, as Khadr, injured and inert, could do little more than grunt.

The latest, and possibly last, sessions of the Guantanamo war-crimes tribunal revealed disturbing details about Khadr's treatment during three months in the custody of U.S. forces at Bagram who were convinced he had thrown the grenade that killed a soldier.

Subsequent interrogations during more than six years in U.S. custody have involved snarling dogs, his limbs chained in "stress positions," and his shackled body upended by guards and used as a human mop to clean the floor.

A dozen minors

Khadr is one of at least a dozen minors captured and brought to Guantanamo in the Bush administration's war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 Guantanamo prisoners charged with war crimes, Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan believed to be a year younger than the Canadian, are the only ones who were juveniles at the time of their alleged offenses.

Human-rights advocates consider the prosecution of Khadr and Jawad another blot on the Guantanamo prisons and court. Neither was accorded the protections promised by treaties to which the United States is signatory.

"Under international law, adults who recruit children for combat are to be prosecuted for that offense. But the children caught up in combat are to be protected, not prosecuted," said Diane Marie Amann, a University of California at Davis law professor who observed the latest hearing in Khadr's case for the National Institute of Military Justice.

Khadr's trial is set to begin Jan. 26, with pretrial hearings starting on the eve of the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to shut down Guantanamo.

Age ruled irrelevant

The Geneva Convention and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child hold that it is the responsibility of the state whose soldiers capture juveniles on the battlefield to work to rehabilitate and integrate them into society. Appeals for consideration of Khadr's and Jawad's ages have been consistently rebuffed at the tribunal.

Army Col. Patrick Parrish has ruled that Khadr's trial can go forward on charges of murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and material support for terrorism. His predecessor as judge in Khadr's case, Army Col. Peter Brownback, ruled this spring that the defendant's age and upbringing were "interesting as a matter of policy" but irrelevant to prosecution under the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Jawad's military judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley, ruled similarly on the child soldier question but has excluded evidence the government was relying on to convict him of attempted murder and other charges. Henley ruled Jawad's confessions were coerced.

"My hope is that the Obama administration as its first action will say, 'We don't want to be the first administration in history to preside over the trial of a child soldier for war crimes,' " said Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, Khadr's lead lawyer.

Kuebler said he was troubled by the December hearing before Parrish, who refused to allow him to introduce as evidence photographs taken at the scene of the July 27, 2002, firefight near Khost, in which Khadr is charged with throwing the grenade that killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer.

The photographs taken by U.S. soldiers as they stormed the bombed-out compound show Khadr lying face down in the dirt under the blasted remnants of a roof.

Kuebler said Khadr could hardly have thrown the grenade that killed Speer if he was buried and unconscious when the Delta Force soldier entered.

Guantanamo supporters defend Khadr's treatment. The tribunal's prosecution chief, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, dismisses critics' contentions that juveniles are prohibited from being held accountable for war crimes by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted in 2000 and a supplemental protocol two years later.

"The convention is misunderstood, if not intentionally misrepresented," Morris said. "It is not a bar to prosecution."

A third of life in custody

Khadr was a toddler when his father shuttled his family between Toronto and Islamic militant strongholds along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Now 22, Khadr has spent almost one-third of his life in U.S. custody. His lawyers describe him as a confused, emotionally damaged young man.


Seven inches taller than when he arrived, the 6-foot-3-inch Khadr walked alone through the courtyard outside his Camp 4 bunkhouse on a recent weekday, behind fences topped by concertina wire and under the constant gaze of guards in watchtowers. He perused the tattered offerings of a library cart and selected an issue of National Geographic.

SOURCE: Chron.com