Omar Khadr was a badly wounded boy of 15 when, in 2002, US forces captured him in Afghanistan. As the dust settled on a suspected al-Qaeda compound after a firefight that July, troops discovered him slumped in the rubble among the dead, leaning against a wall.
One soldier — identified only as “OC1” in a military document that was mistakenly released six years later — testified that there were two survivors among the insurgents. He claimed he killed the first, then shot Khadr (who was facing away from him) twice in the back, leaving two large exit wounds across his upper body. In a legal motion, another officer present at the scene wrote: “(He’s) missing a piece of his chest and I can see his heart beating.”
The Pentagon alleges that Khadr was responsible for the death of the US special forces medic Christopher Speer, who sustained fatal injuries that day from a grenade hurled from the compound.
Khadr — a Canadian citizen — is the last prisoner from a western country among the 176 “enemy combatants” still held at Guantanamo Bay. Eight months after Barack Obama’s campaign deadline to close the facility, the future of its detainees continues to be determined outside the protection of international law. Khadr’s long-delayed trial, which began today, is the first official terror case to be heard before the military courts under the Obama administration; it is also the first war crimes trial since Nuremberg for offences allegedly committed by a minor.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the UN special envoy for children in armed conflict, said today that the proceedings were of dubious legality and has released a statement urging the US to abandon them. She said:
The statute of the International Criminal Court makes it clear that no one under 18 will be tried for war crimes, and prosecutors in other international tribunals have used their discretion not to prosecute children . . . Even if Omar Khadr were to be tried in a national jurisdiction, juvenile justice standards are clear — children should not be tried before military tribunals.
Since his capture, Khadr has been housed with adult detainees and denied access to education. His defence team has long complained that the statements on which the case against him are based were obtained illegally through torture, his interrogators even threatening him with gang rape and death. Yesterday, however, the US military judge ruled in favour of allowing such dubiously extracted “confessions” as evidence.
In his January State of the Union speech, President Obama spoke of how Americans at both ends of the political spectrum aspired “to give their children a better life”. The very fact that the Khadr case is roaring ahead — with scarcely a word of concern from the president or the mainstream US media — shows how hollow that flourish of oratory was.
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