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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: U.S. Kangaroo Court Must Be Stopped The Obama administration began a military trial against Canadian citizen Omar Khadr last week, a proceeding that has sparked considerable criticism internationally but has been nothing but an afterthought in the U.S. Khadr's story is a particularly sad one. Born in Toronto, he found himself pushed into the role of a child soldier by his father. Badly wounded in a clash with U.S. troops, the then 15-year-old Khadr was labelled an enemy combatant and held for more than eight years in U.S. custody. While Khadr’s age should be enough to warrant questioning the morality of treating him as a hardened terrorist, the case is rife with so many other problems it is virtually unfathomable it has advanced this far. Yet it has, so we must — in the interest of justice — attempt to point out how extremely wrong on so many levels this “trial” is. Khadr's “war crime,” at least the one that he is accused of, was throwing a hand grenade at U.S. troops and potentially killing one of them. Herein the myriad problems with the case begin to unfold. Historically, a “combatant” throwing a hand grenade at his enemy during a war has not been considered a war crime. Indeed, the U.S. troops involved in this incident threw grenades as well, almost certainly killing other combatants in precisely the same way. Yet asking if this is a crime in the first place risks losing sight of several other issues. The evidence that Khadr actually threw the grenade is entirely circumstantial. A grenade was thrown and a U.S. soldier was killed and Khadr happened to be one of the surviving combatants at the site. Such a case, one would hope, would never stand on its own in an American civilian court, which is of course why this new style of “military justice” for non-U.S. citizens was invented. But even military juries have scruples, and the prosecution needed more to sell this case to them: enter the confessions. But what the jury will be allowed to hear is that Omar Khadr confessed on multiple occasions to throwing this grenade. Yet these confessions were a matter of enormous pre-trial contention, primarily because they were elicited via torture. Khadr was abused by U.S. interrogators on a number of occasions, and was threatened with gang rape on at least one occasion. He was further denied access to medication for his wounds. His chief interrogator at the time later ended up in a military prison for killing another detainee during a detention. It was after all of this abuse that Khadr, still just a boy, confessed to throwing the grenade. Yet the judge decided that since the confessions were given to a different interrogator than the ones who abused him, they were admissible in the military trial. And now faced with this bogus trial for a dubious crime, based on coerced evidence, against a child soldier and Canadian citizen who spent years being abused in detention, is it any wonder President Barack Obama — once so keen on trying Gitmo detainees in a civilian court of law — has since ditched the idea altogether? No self-respecting civilian court would allow such a mockery of justice. Yet the trial continues seemingly with momentum of its own. Perhaps the only possible way of stopping it (short of an almost miraculous shift in American public opinion toward unconditional support for human rights) would be for the Canadian government to request his return, but there is no indication of that happening. Jason Ditz is news editor at Antiwar.com in San Francisco.
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#8. To: Ada (#0)
the author makes a lot of great points. I wish he had a clear understanding that we the Americans do not dictate to the United States. They dictate to us. the government decides to do what it decides to do without consulting the Americans, without input from us, without respect for our values, without any concern for our interests or welfare. but the americans do have a knack for following this regime. there have been many individual americans who were not good at following, but tried to oppose instead, and wound up dead.
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