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Omar Khadr was 15 years old in 2002 when he was sent to prison at Guantánamo Bay for allegedly throwing a grenade in an Afghanistan firefight that killed an American soldier.
Khadr lost an eye and was shot in the back but survived to be captured and detained by the U.S. government. Now 23, he confessed under threat of dog attacks and death by gang rape.
He was beaten, used as a human mop, subjected to light and water torture and had his hair pulled out.
His defense attorney says that his confession -- obtained through torture and coercion -- are inadmissible. A military judge presiding over the first war commissions under the Obama administration disagrees, saying that the confessions were freely given after the abuse subsided and are cleanly admissible in court.
Canada's Globe and Mail reports:
In May hearings, a man identified as Interrogator 1 said in testimony that he threatened Mr. Khadr with being gang-raped to death if he did not co-operate. That interrogator was later identified as former U.S. Army Sergeant Joshua Claus. He has also been convicted of abusing a different detainee and has left the military.
Mr. Khadr’s military-appointed lawyer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jon Jackson, argued this instance, as well as other alleged instances of torture and coercion, are enough to render any future confessions –- even those in so-called “clean” interrogations -– inadmissible in court.
Khadr's late father, an Egyptian-Canadian, brought him and his brothers to Afghanistan in the late 1990s to fight for Jihad. Omar survived to be, according to the United Nations, the first child soldier to be prosecuted for a war crime since World War II. This is in spite of strong opposition from the ACLU and the United Nations.
Khadr's attorney, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, considers this outcome a rejection by the Obama administration of their initial pledge that Gitmo would be a very different and more humane place under their leadership, until the time that they promised it would close down:
When President Obama was elected, I believed that we were going to close the book on Guantanamo and the military commissions. And instead President Obama has decided to write the next sad, pathetic chapter in the book of the military commissions.
On the ACLU's Blog of Rights, Jennifer Turner wonders where the promised accountability is:
Though President Obama promised that coerced evidence would not be used against detainees in the military commissions, today's ruling suggests that as a country, we stand for abusing a 15-year-old teenager into confessing, and using those confessions against him in an illegitimate proceeding.
Not just Omar Khadr, but also the United States, is on trial starting tomorrow. We should show the world that we can provide a fair trial to Omar Khadr, after what is known about what we've done to him. But that simply is not going to happen in a Guantánamo military commission designed to ensure quick convictions at the expense of due process and transparency, and structured to prevent the revelation of abusive interrogations engaged in by the U.S. government.
United Nations Special Envoy for Children in Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy stated that Khadr's case endangers child soldiers all over the world and called on the U.S. and Canada to intervene:
Over the last decade the international community has worked together to protect children in armed conflict. The United States and Canada have led the way in creating and implementing these norms. Without their support we would not have been able to persuade the Security Council to create a Working Group on children and armed conflict nor be able to release thousands of child soldiers around the world. I urge both governments to come to a mutually acceptable solution on the future of Omar Khadr that would prevent him from being convicted of a war crime that he allegedly committed when he was child.
The Canadian government has reportedly shown no interest in intervening in Omar Khadr's case. Law students and attorneys from across Canada have formed the Omar Khadr Project:
We add our voices to the various non-governmental organizations, law societies, faith groups, political parties, and ordinary Canadians demanding the immediate repatriation of Omar Khadr. We do so because Canada’s response to the case of Omar Khadr represents a betrayal of justice and a betrayal of Canadian values.
