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Case Against Omar Khadr Unravels

By Alexa

A key witness in the prosecution of Omar Khadr for war crimes has been withdrawn, on the basis that a self-incriminating "statement" made in 2004 by Omar was in fact a confession made under torture.

Omar Khadr, the youngest person in history to have been charged with war crimes, was tortured and used as a human mop since his capture at age 14 and subsequent indefinite detention at Bush's Caribbean gulag. And you and I can nod our heads and say, "yes, si, pobrecito. You hurt him enough and he'll say whatever you want to hear." But it gets worse. In the short, sad story of Omar's life, there's nearly always something worse.

What if there was no reason for him to have been captured (or charged, or detained) at all? What if, I swear to you, I'm not making this up, an eyewitness confession from a US soldier seven years after the incident in question exculpates Omar Khadr of any wrongdoing whatsoever?

What do you get when you turn your toaster upside down and shake it for crumbs? Let's examine the Less Than Toaster Crumbs [TM] evidence against Omar Khadr.  
Cursory Background:
Ahmed Khadr, Omar's father, always said he did not want to die in bed. He wanted to be killed. When his children were very young, he told them, "If you love me, pray that I will get martyred." Three times he asked Omar's older brother Abdurahman to become a suicide bomber. It would bring honor to the family, he said. Abdurahman declined. Later, when Ahmed sensed that Abdurahman's faith was weakening, he told him, "If you ever betray Islam, I will be the one to kill you."

Omar and his brothers attended madrassahs and Islamic schools. His mother and two older sisters covered their bodies and completely veiled their faces. At home, the Khadr children were warned that the purity of Islam was being compromised, from within and without. The quest to repurify it diminished to insignificance everything else in life. Purity was the simple measure by which good and evil were distinguished, and the means of destroying evil were equally simple. The Khadr children were raised to serve a purpose. Their fealty was sounded every day.

In 1988, when Omar was two, the Khadrs left Toronto for Peshawar, Pakistan, so Ahmed could take a job with a charity called Human Concern International. In those days, Peshawar was an operational base for Islamist insurgents fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had gone there to recruit, fund and train mujahedeen. Intelligence sources claim that many of the orphans and refugees aided by Khadr later became fundamentalist guerrillas under the guidance of bin Laden.

Khadr's family has a long history of alleged involvement with radical Islamic causes, and his lawyers have said he shouldn't suffer because of some of the things relatives have said and done.

Khadr's father was an avowed al-Qaeda sympathizer before he was killed in fighting with Pakistani military forces in 2003.

His brother, Abdullah, is in a Toronto jail fighting extradition to the U.S. where he's been charged with providing weapons to al-Qaeda.

Not mentioned in the above excerpt from CBC.ca is the fact that Abdurahman Khadr, Omar's older brother, has been given some sort of "trusty" status at Guantanamo, and assists the US with translations and interrogations in exchange for no charges leveled against him. (Think of state's evidence on bad crack.)

The Coerced Confession

"Mr. Khadr expressed fear of retribution for his initial unwillingness to say what the agents wanted to hear, expressing his hope that his 'other interrogator would not be mad at him' for initially failing to confess."

The defence had planned to make Mr. Khadr's treatment during his entire captivity from July 2002 until December 2004 an issue in his trial but corroborating documentation related to the earlier time frame has been lost.

"Evidence is out there to suggest that the reason we don't have (earlier) materials . . . is that the government was in the process of systematically destroying such information to prevent its use in legal proceedings," Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler said. (Globe and Mail}

Hard to overstate the importance of this in a child captive whose first words were: "Kill me. Please just kill me."

In July 2002, a Special Forces unit in southeast Afghanistan received intelligence that a group of Al Qaeda fighters was operating out of a mud-brick compound in Ab Khail, a small hill town near the Pakistani border. The Taliban regime had fallen seven months earlier, but the rough border regions had not yet been secured. When the soldiers arrived at the compound, they looked through a crack in the door and saw five men armed with assault rifles sitting inside.

The soldiers called for the men to surrender. The men refused. The soldiers sent Pashto translators into the compound to negotiate. The men promptly slaughtered the translators. The American soldiers called in air support and laid siege to the compound, bombing and strafing it until it was flat and silent. They walked into the ruins. They had not gotten far when a wounded fighter, concealed behind a broken wall, threw a grenade, killing Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer. The soldiers immediately shot the fighter three times in the chest, and he collapsed.

When the soldiers got close, they saw that he was just a boy. Fifteen years old and slightly built, he could have passed for thirteen. He was bleeding heavily from his wounds, but he was -- unbelievably -- alive. The soldiers stood over him.

"Kill me," he murmured, in fluent English. "Please, just kill me." (Rolling Stone)

A Fate Worse Than Death?
You tell me, gente. At 15 years old, this child soldier - and the Speers story nonwithstanding, Omar Khadr was and is a child soldier who should never have been charged with anything under the Optional Protocol of the UN Declaration on Human Rights - was taken to Bagram AFB.

At Bagram, he was repeatedly brought into interrogation rooms on stretchers, in great pain. Pain medication was withheld, apparently to induce cooperation. He was ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still wet. When he could walk again, he was forced to stand for hours at a time with his hands tied above a door frame. Interrogators put a bag over his head and held him still while attack dogs leapt at his chest. Sometimes he was kept chained in an interrogation room for so long he urinated on himself.

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. "Get up," the guard said. "You have a reservation." "Reservation" is the commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation.

In the interrogation room, Omar's interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Omar tightly to an eye bolt in the center of the floor. Omar's hands and feet were shackled together; the eye bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for half an hour.

Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar's arms, pulled them behind his back and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this particular "stress position" can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they'd successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days. (Rolling Stone)

SERE techniques nonwithstanding, "the bow" - the position Omar was tied in for what must have seemed like eternity, is a torture technique at least as old as the Spanish Inquisition. (Alfred McCoy, A Question of Torture.) It is believed to be fatal, although there's no hard data on that. There are historical accounts of amputation after "the bow" because a limb or limbs deprived of oxygen and blood circulation for long periods of time don't reliably recover and become gangrenous. Let that sink in for a minute. If someone put you or I in that "stress position," risking our lives and recklessly endangering our health to the point of amputation, what would the charges be? Does the Bybee memo cover this?

Bybee's interpretations guided the Bush Administration for twenty-two months. And a powerful case has been made that Bybee's extraordinary reading of the law led to Americans engaging in torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

The memo defines torture so narrowly that only activities resulting in "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" qualify. Source.

The Prosecution's Case Collapses
Khadr's defense has always contended that the death of Christopher Speer was caused by "friendly fire." On Friday, the evidence supporting this -- and a surprise witness - were made public.

A U.S. soldier reported that he accidentally stepped on Omar Khadr following a firefight in Afghanistan because Khadr was covered in rubble, casting doubt on whether the 15-year-old Canadian could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer.

Identified only as "Soldier # 2," it's expected he will testify that he "inadvertently stood on top of (Khadr) and thought he was standing on a 'trap door' because the ground did not seem solid," a motion submitted to the court states.

The soldier then "bent down to move the brush away to see what was beneath him and discovered that he was standing on a person; and that Mr. Khadr appeared to be 'acting dead,' " the motion continued.

Khadr's defence team told a military judge here Friday that this soldier's testimony will be key at trial because it proves the Toronto-born captive could not be guilty of the Pentagon's charge of "murder in violation of the laws of war" for Speer's death.(Michelle Shepard, CagePrisoners)

Friday's revelation is the latest evidence that has trickled out during the past two years of pre-trial hearings, chipping away at the prosecution's assertion that Khadr threw a grenade at the end of a firefight on July 27, 2002. The report that Khadr may have been covered under rubble at the time the grenade was thrown conflicts with testimony of other soldiers who are expected to state that Khadr was sitting on top of the rubble facing away from them when he was shot twice in the back and captured.  

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on December 15, 2008 (boomark / email).