The state versus a boy soldier
Omar Khadr, 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and imprisoned first in Bagram, then in Guantánamo, will at last face trial this month on charges never before brought in the history of war
by Chase Madar
Barack Obama may not be as audacious as his supporters had hoped, but his government will soon be the first since the second world war to prosecute a child solder. The trial of Omar Khadr, a Canadian national captured at the age of 15 outside Kabul in 2002, should begin this August at Guantánamo Bay. It will be the Obama administration's first Gitmo trial, and pre-trial hearings have already begun to determine how much evidence is to be excluded because of the torture and abuse he suffered at Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.
Khadr is accused of throwing a hand grenade that killed a US serviceman in a firefight between US forces and jihadis. He confessed to tossing the grenade from his hospital bed at Bagram prison while heavily sedated, his chest wounds barely closed. Over months, an extravagantly detailed confession was developed by a succession of interrogators, from the since convicted abuser of prisoners who first interviewed Khadr to a female military interrogator with an MA in anthropology who soothed him to good effect. Omar Khadr repudiated his confession after being transported to Guantánamo, and has alleged in a lengthy affidavit that he suffered torture and abusive coercion at both prisons. Whether all his claims will be corroborated is unclear, but a witness for the prosecution has already testified that he saw Khadr at Bagram standing with his arms outstretched above eye level, wrists chained to the walls of a five-foot-square cell, hooded and weeping. If a US soldier were treated this way, few would hesitate to call it torture.
Prosecuting a child soldier thus treated in custody is not the savviest PR move for a government eager to show it has mended its ways. But here, as elsewhere in national security policy, Obama is playing mainly to a domestic audience. Many Americans are baffled by the idea of clemency for a youthful offender, let alone an accused terrorist. In a country where dozens of prisoners are serving life without parole for crimes committed when they were 12 or 13, and trying 15-year-old felons as adults is routine if not mandatory, the prosecution of Omar Khadr is not a hard sell.
The rest of the world, so eager to welcome a kinder, gentler US since Obama's election, will be less indulgent. Unicef (now headed by a former US national security adviser) and every major human rights group have denounced the Khadr prosecution, as has the UN's special representative for children and armed conflict, and former child soldiers. The Khadr trial is giving migraines to many State Department officials.
One might have expected the US to persuade its usually pliant northern neighbour to repatriate Khadr to avoid international embarrassment. If the detainee had any other surname, this would have happened years ago.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5487&updaterx=2010-08-09+14%3A52%3A03
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