On Thursday afternoon I watched Omar Khadr's sole defense lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapse in the Guantanamo Bay courtroom in the middle of conducting a cross-examination of a key government witness. He was taken away on a stretcher by ambulance, hooked up to an I.V.. Fortunately, Jackson, who's only 39 years old, was breathing normally at the time. As an observer in the courtroom, however, I was stunned. He had fallen to the floor so suddenly; moments before he seemed to be in perfect health and in complete control of his carefully targeted questioning. I learned Friday morning that the trial has been suspended indefinitely.
The trial of Omar Khadr is the first one before a military commission under the Obama administration, and the first alleged child soldier to be tried by a Western country since World War II. This is also the first time that an enemy is being tried as a war criminal for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier during a firefight. That's normally not considered a war crime, although the United States, in the Military Commissions Act of 2009, declared it one if the US soldier was killed by someone not in uniform - known as an unprivileged enemy belligerent. Such individuals are also normally called civilians.
The irony of the U.S. charging with murder a 15-year-old civilian who was shot twice in the back, blinded and peppered with shrapnel by US forces during a four-hour shootout and aerial bombardment is becoming increasingly clear as the government begins to present its case. Although the lead prosecutor, Justice Department lawyer and former Marine Jeffrey Groharing, argued in his opening statement this morning that Omar Khadr is a terrorist and a murderer who violated the laws of war, the evidence presented so far suggests that he was a kid forced by his father to help his father's al Qaeda friends when he was barely an adolescent. Raised in Canada until the age of nine, he was dragged to Afghanistan and stuck with those al Qaeda friends in the compound when U.S. forces decided to storm it. There's been no indication whatsoever that Khadr had any choice in the matter: not over where he was, what he was doing or with whom he was associated.
The difficulty of proving a murder in active combat is also becoming increasingly clear. Repeatedly, the government's two lead witnesses today testified about the difficulty of knowing or even seeing what exactly was going on in the firefight that took place at a compound near Khost, Afghanistan on July 27, 2002 - the firefight that led to the death of the U.S. soldier who Khadr is accused of killing. In his initial report that night, the Special Forces Commander in charge of the raid, identified at trial as Colonel W., said the enemy who'd thrown the grenade had been killed in combat. In the same report, he wrote that there had been three combatants killed, and one wounded in action. Khadr was the only person who got out of that firefight alive. Col. W did not explain that contradiction in his testimony today.
Testimony from Col. W and another witness, Sargeant Major D, also at the firefight, attempted to establish that the grenade had come from an alley where Khadr was later found. But Khadr was not the only person in that alley. An older man, found with an AK-47 and another grenade, was found in the same alley.
And, Col. W testified, when soldiers returned to the scene of the crime later, they learned that villagers had found five more bodies in the rubble, dragged them away and buried them. Those bodies were never found.
When asked by Khadr's lawyer why he didn't carefully secure the compound after the firefight, collect evidence and treat the site as one would the scene of a crime, Col. W., a reservist who's also been a police chief for the past 30 years, said that wasn't what he was there to do. He wasn't acting as a policeman; he was fighting a war.
"No one at that time ever believed we'd be in a court in a trial like this over a terrorist," he said.
Of course they didn't. Because it's unprecedented to turn the ordinary actions of an enemy fighting U.S. forces into a war crime. It's what happens in war. And it's likely going to be impossible for the government to prove who did what in that particular fight, eight years later.
To hold a young teenager responsible for the actions his father ordered him to do seems even more bizarre. In a video the government played today in court, a young Omar Khadr, looking pre-pubescent without any facial hair, is seen laughing and sitting among two adult men, who appear to be making explosives. Omar Khadr may have been helping them, though his role is unclear from the video. But is the child in the video really the face that President Obama wants to present as the first war criminal he tries in his "war on terror"?
After the first day of testimony for the government, I'm left wondering who really is the criminal here. Sargeant Major D described how he entered the compound, armed with an N-4 and a Glock-9mm. The compound had just been shot up by U.S. Apache helicopters and bombarded by two 500-pound bombs. After sensing a grenade and small arms fire coming from an alleyway, Major D ran to the alley and shot a man with an AK-47 and a grenade in the head and killed him. Omar Khadr, however, was seated on the ground, unarmed, in a dust-covered light-blue tunic, his back to the Major D. Khadr was not holding or aiming a gun at the Sargeant, or threatening him in any way. Yet Sargeant Major D shot him twice in the back. He then walked over and thumped him in the eye, to see if he was still alive. Surprisingly, he was.
Lt. Col. Jackson, Khadr's defense lawyer, asked Sarg. Major D if he knows the laws of war, which prohibit killing a civilian not actively participating in hostilities. Jackson also pointed out that there was an armed civilian CIA agent accompanying the US forces that day.
Which got me thinking: who is the real war criminal here? And who gets to decide?
Lt. Col. Jackson is doing an excellent job of posing those questions to the jury of seven military commission members, chosen yesterday. Let's hope he recovers quickly and can resume his role at trial tomorrow.
Update: On Thursday evening, the Military Commission Defense office reported that Jackson, who had had gallblatter surgery in June, passed a gall stone in court today. He is in the Guantanamo Bay hospital, where he is receiving morphine as a painkiller. Doctors will decide by tomorrow whether and when he'll be able to resume handling Khadr's defense. Because he is Khadr's only lawyer, however, the trial cannot go on without him.
Update II: An official from the Office of Military Commission Defense told reporters this morning that the trial of Omar Khadr has been suspended for at least 30 days. Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, Khadr's lawyer, will be evacuated from Guantanamo Bay and taken to a hospital in the United States. The judge did not call the court back into session, however, and has not announced any of these developments on the record.
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The prosecution of children is barbaric. The prosecution of people defending themselves against foreign troops as anything other than soldiers (under the Geneva Convention) is absurd. "American Excepionalism" is a bad joke that has led our country into moral bankruptcy.
How would we treat an under age civilian caught up in the violence of a DEA raid?
The Third Geneva Because Mr. Khadr, now 23, was embedded with al Qaeda militants rather than a national army, the Defense Department maintains he had no right under international law to fight U.S. forces.
Historian James Bacque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bacque
"In Other Losses (1989), Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more are said to have perished. The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "protecting power" and POWs were reclassified as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" in order to avoid recognition under the Geneva Convention. Bacque argued that this alleged mass murder was a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. He laid the blame on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying Germans were kept on starvation rations even though there was enough food in the world to avert the lethal shortage in Germany in 1945-1946"
4 . Khadr was not a soldier at all
After the barbarity of the Second World War, the nations of the world tried to agree to some laws of war. In 1949 they ratified the Third Geneva Convention, that clearly defined a soldier. Article 4 includes “volunteer corps” and “organized resistance movements,” even those operating “outside their own territory.” But resistance fighters need to do things to distinguish themselves from mere murderers: They have to be part of a chain of command; to show a flag or emblem “recognizable at a distance,” to carry their weapons “openly,” not secretly; and to follow the “laws and customs of war.”
Khadr had to do those four things to be considered a soldier, and entitled to any rights. He did none of them.
on Khadr.
>...The first photo is Khadr sitting next to an AK-47 submachine gun (that is a fan in his hand). The other photo is Khadr assembling improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Both are screen grabs from the Sixty Minutes segment on Khadr, which is pretty well done. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/16/60minutes/main3516048.shtml Via http://ezralevant.com/2010/07/the-truth-about-omar-khadr.html e Khadr as a way to undermine the war on terror.
3. Khadr was not a child soldier
Instead of talking about what Khadr actually did, his supporters prefer to focus on his youth — he was 15 when he allegedly threw the grenade at Sgt. Speer. Fifteen is young, but it’s not unheard of; in the First World War, Canada’s Tommy Ricketts received the Victoria Cross when he was 17.
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child — hardly a right-wing document — is clear: 15-year-olds are not child soldiers. Article 38 of that treaty defines a child soldier as someone who has “not attained the age of 15” — so 14 and under.
Khadr was old enough to be in an instructional video on how to kill; he’s surely old enough to stand trial.
4
And why create a new military commisions act to hold on to such prisoners, are the old laws not sufficient to guarantee a conviction?
Go waterborad yourself.
The personnel who carried out these acts are protected above the law and the cover-up
continues.
http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368
from war crimes prosecution and to protect those who carried out their orders.
Expose the lies.
Expose the excess of military industrial hubris and the involvement of the CIA
in training, funding and arming the very Freedom Fighters who turned on us when
they were abandoned . Remember Charlie Wilson's War
Ignore the chickenhawk cons and do what is right..