At 22, Omar Khadr Has Spent a Third of His Life in Guantanamo

By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog. Posted September 20, 2008.

On Friday, Omar Khadr, the sole Canadian citizen in Guantanamo, marked his 22nd birthday in isolation. Seized in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old, Omar has now spent nearly a third of his life in U.S. custody, in conditions that ought to be shameful to the U.S. administration responsible for holding him and to the Canadian government that has abdicated its responsibilities toward him.

Under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), to which both the United States and Canada are signatories, juvenile prisoners -- defined as those accused of a crime that took place when they were under 18 years of age -- "require special protection." The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes "the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities," and requires its signatories to promote "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict."

Several factors have conspired to keep Omar in Guantanamo: in particular, U.S. allegations (only recently challenged) that Omar threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in the firefight that preceded his capture; a general indifference toward him in Canada because of the alleged sins of his family (his father, who raised funds for the welfare of the mujahedeen of Afghanistan and their families, was reportedly close to Osama bin Laden); and a general disregard for the traditional rules of war, in which not only should a child be protected from punishment, but any combatant seized in wartime should be regarded as a soldier, subject to the prohibition on "cruel and inhuman treatment" and interrogation dictated by the Geneva Conventions, and not held as a terrorist to be brutalized and interrogated at will.

As Omar turns 22, however, it is abundantly clear that his treatment -- which includes a heartless disregard for his terrible wounds in the months following his capture, severe isolation in Guantanamo, and prolonged periods of abuse and humiliation -- demonstrates a blatant disregard on the part of the U.S. administration for the Geneva Conventions. This kind of behavior is reprehensible in the cases of the adults in U.S. custody, and even more grotesque in the case of Omar and the 21 other juveniles (at least) who have been held in Guantanamo throughout its long history and who have been deprived of the protection not only of the Geneva Conventions but also of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

What makes Omar's case even more shocking is that, because of the nature of the "crime" of which he has been accused (killing a U.S. soldier in wartime), he was chosen by the administration for prosecution in its system of "terror trials" at Guantanamo, the Military Commissions -- unrelated to any other form of U.S. justice -- that were conceived by Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001.

Although he was initially charged in November 2005, Omar's case -- like that of the other nine prisoners charged in the Military Commissions -- was dismissed in June 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the entire process was illegal, but he was one of the first prisoners to be charged again (along with the Australian David Hicks and the Yemeni Salim Hamdan) when the Military Commissions were revived by Congress later that year.

For the last 15 months, since the first pretrial hearings were held, the case against Omar has stumbled from one setback to another. Initially, his case was dismissed by the government-appointed military judge, Col. Peter Brownback, because of discrepancies in the wording of the Military Commissions Act (the legislation that revived the process); in the last year his military defense team, led by Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler and his Canadian civilian attorneys, Dennis Edney and Nathan Whitling, have done everything in their power to persuade the Canadian government to press for Omar's return and to persuade the U.S. government to call off his trial.

These have included submissions pointing out the weakness -- or illegality -- of the government's claims that the charges against Omar constitute "war crimes," suitably shocked announcements following the emergence of long-suppressed evidence indicating that Omar did not throw the grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer, and a heartfelt plea for the U.S. government not to set a vile precedent by prosecuting a juvenile. "If jurisdiction is exercised over Mr. Khadr," the defense team explained, "the military judge will be the first in Western history to preside over the trial of alleged war crimes committed by a child. No international criminal tribunal established under the laws of war, from Nuremberg forward, has ever prosecuted former child soldiers as war criminals. … A critical component of the response of our nation and the world to the tragedy of the use and abuse of child solders in war by terrorist organizations like al Qaeda is that post-conflict legal proceedings must pursue the best interest of the victimized child -- with the aim of their rehabilitation and reintegration into society, not their imprisonment or execution."

See more stories tagged with: khalid sheikh mohammed, omar khadr, salim hamdan, military commissions, guantánamo, un convention on the righ, child soldiers, col. peter brownback, william kuebler

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and he is the author of The Guantanamo Files.

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