Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen captured at age 15 and imprisoned in at Guantanamo since 2003, is on trial at Guantanamo. Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer in a firefight in July, 2002, near Khost, Afghanistan. Khadr was shot twice in the back after throwing the grenade. On Saturday:
- Judges cleared the court to review a videotape that has been on YouTube for two years. The videotape had already been released since it had been evidence in a Canadian Supreme Court proceeding.
- A Special Forces officer testified that his alteration of a field report years after the fact was “completely innocent”.
The whole case revolves around whether the confessions Khadr gave in 2002 and 2003, when he was 15 and 16, were voluntary. Khadr has rejected a plea agreement that would have had him admit to throwing the grenade.
This whole case makes it clear why the Bush Administration stalled Gitmo prosecutions until after they left office. All the choices here are ugly, and we’ve only started to unravel this mess.
Jamie
So what should we make of Dresden?
toujoursdan
Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper is every bit as complicit. Other western countries successfully repatriated their Gitmo detainees, but the Canadian Conservative government has blocked him from going home. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that this violated his Charter rights.
Even if he threw the grenade, by international law he is a child soldier.
This is a good backgrounder on his case. It makes me embarrassed to be a Canadian: CBC News: The Case of Omar Khadr
Omnes Omnibus
@Jamie: Dolls.
Nancy Irving
What I don’t get is why, even if he did throw the grenade, he is on trial for it.
Soldiers fighting wars throw grenades. Our soldiers throw grenades. The Afghans were fighting a war, against the United States’ invading force. This is the case, whether or not you think the U.S. was justified in the military actions it took against Afghanistan.
Is the rule now that any act of war, committed by an enemy, automatically becomes a “war crime”?
MikeJ
@Nancy Irving: The argument is that he wasn’t in uniform serving in the military. Instead he was part of a rag tag band of high school kids who took to the hills and…WOLVERINES!!!!!
scav
@Nancy Irving:
well, that would be logically symmetric with the “anything committed by the right kind of ‘mercan isn’t a war crime,” rule — but assuming that logical consistency is a goal of that lot may be a bridge too far.
asiangrrlMN
@Nancy Irving: I’m with you. Throwing a grenade is part of war, as far as my limited knowledge of war tells me. This shit just really…yeah. Between this and the BP mess, it’s not a good morning so far.
Omnes Omnibus
@Nancy Irving: The fact that he is a Canadian citizen also comes into play.
Mr Furious
What’s up with the M-80 thread? I can’t tell Wile E to go fuck himself…
Mr Furious
Anyone who didn’t throw their hands up and chant “USA! USA! USA!” is apparently a war criminal entitled to nothing but a towel between waterboarding sessions.
This is a fucking mess.
Mike Kay
@Nancy Irving: well, what should be done? you only have 2 choices, you either hold him as a pow until the war concludes or you give him a trial.
SGEW
I hope everyone’s following Attackerman, who’s actually at Guantanamo covering the hearings for the Washington Independent.
Wapiti
@Nancy Irving:
Agreed. At the time of the US invasion, the Taliban was the defacto government of Afghanistan. So the Taliban forces, local militias, and foreigners fighting for the Taliban would be lawful combatants. (The US military has foreigners serving in its ranks. Are they illegal combatants?)
Al Qaeda is a separate case. Because al Qaeda committed a terrorist acts on 9/11, it pretty clearly violated the requirement that forces must obey the Geneva Conventions to gain the higher protections of the Geneva Conventions. Not saying that the US didn’t also violate provisions, for example, in how they treated the Taliban and Iraq forces.
It’s ugly business, either way.
Viva BrisVegas
A Canadian citizen who attacks US troops anywhere deserves what he gets, and visa versa.
That said, his age at the time and treatment since capture are definitely ameliorating factors.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Jamie: Wiz of a wizard.
burnspbesq
One of life’s little ironies: the lawyer who arguably gummed up the works more than any single individual, Neal Katyal, is now the Deputy SG.
Fern
@Viva BrisVegas: Well, that and a pretty strong appearance that the evidence against him was cooked.
Svensker
@Viva BrisVegas:
When both of them are in a 3rd country? What if the “US troop” is a citizen of yet another country, as many are?
The kid was fighting with his side against another side. Geneva should be the deciding factor. Not to mention his age.
sparky
yes indeedy! after all, it was unthinkable that anyone would want to defend themselves against a foreign invasion (however they happened to get there). so of course the invaders take those horrible defenders away! and put them in prison for years with no trial! and then the invaders at home can cluck about how difficult it is to decide what to do with these savages who foolishly attempted to defend themselves. so very very difficult! fainting couches all around!
yeah, a really hard choice. let the poor bastard go.
edit: perhaps he’s only sitting in jail because the Canadians don’t want to be embarrassed–again. ahh, the divine powers of our rulers: it’s ok to kill people, just don’t lose face!
Mnemosyne
@toujoursdan:
That might be a decent argument for giving the kid a trial rather than just releasing him — if we can say, “Hey, he proved his innocence in a court of law,” it would be awfully hard for Canada to continue to block him from returning.
Of course, we all know why this poor kid has been held for 7 years — it’s going to be enormously embarrassing to the US (and probably Canada, too) when he’s able to tell his story. Someone needs to clue in the administration that it’s not going to be any less embarrassing if we hold him even longer.
Fern
@sparky: The Canadian govt certainly does not want him and has never even requested his repatriation. He comes from a somewhat despicable family and certainly repatriation would not play well with a lot of people – but that hardly seems enough of a reason to keep him locked up indefinitely. He was after all only 15 at the time and in Afghanistan with his father. He should be allowed the protections due to child soldiers.
toujoursdan
@Fern:
The Canadian government actively refuses to request a repatriation, even to have a trial and serve any sentence in a Canadian prison.
The 3 opposition parties have been hammering at the government to fix this problem for years.
Erik Vanderhoff
On July 5, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed on to the “Child Soldiers Treaty,” an Optional Protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. According to the Center for Defense Information:
Of course, Republican Congresses failed to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child, so the U.S. had to have special provisions to be able to sign the Optional Protocol. It would appear that there is a special legal limbo here.
Cathie from Canada
@Mnemosyne:
The Khadr family are profoundly offensive, and are uniformly disliked across Canada, so it is doubtful that Omar could say anything that would make Canadians more sypmathetic to him.
However, that said, he IS a Canadian citizen and it is also profoundly offensive that our government hasn’t even tried to get him back — its really scary that any Canadian could be thrown into jail somewhere and the Conservatives think they can decide whether to ask for repatriation based on whether they liked you or not. Khadr isn’t the only example of this.
Mnemosyne
@Cathie from Canada:
I have to admit, I know zero about the Kadhr family, but I’m guessing that if he denounces his family’s beliefs and cuts off ties with them, he would gain some sympathy. Of course, since (IIRC) everyone but his family has completely deserted him, the odds of that happening are very low.
We’ve managed to have some extremely virulent white supremacists re-invent themselves here in the US by completely rejecting their upbringing and speaking out against racism, so there is at least some precedent in the States for such a thing. Don’t know about Canada, though.
Raven
Wow, so in Canada having human rights depends on whether you’re popular?
Hey, that’s just like in the United States!
Nancy Irving
Re the idea that he was not in uniform made his action a war crime:
I understand that this has consequences in the law of war, but I’d also point out that this would have made the civilian “partisan” forces who resisted the Nazis in WWII, some of whom engaged in sabotage and other actions that involved the killing of German troops or collaborationist officials–into war criminals too.
Needless to say, the Allies did not prosecute any of them.
Of course, the Nazis may have done so, had they won the war.
It’s comforting to see we’re in such good company (not).
Nancy Irving
And re Canada’s actions (or lack thereof):
I wonder how their government would respond if he were a Jewish Canadian who happened to be visiting Israel when it was invaded by Egypt, and took up arms against the invader as a partisan resistance fighter?
DavidTC
Okay, some people are confused.
Fighting without a uniform does not your actions a war crime. make. Throwing grenades at soldiers is not a war crime. As long as you are shooting at actual military personal, and aren’t doing some of the things you’re forbidden to do, like dressing as the Red Cross, you are well within the accepted laws of war. (Hell, shooting at your own country’s soldiers isn’t even a war crime, it’s just treason.)
Now, there’s some slight questions about why you’re out of uniform. If you’re out of uniform so you can, in essence, use civilians as human shields, fading into and out of the fight, that might be possibly considered a violation of rules of war, as it endangers the civilians you’re hiding in. It’s one of those vague areas, like blowing up a enemy bridge which is used to move military vehicles…but when you blow it up it currently has civilian traffic on it, and you know it. There are vagaries there, and I’m not sure we have the moral high ground WRT protecting civilians.
But if you’re not in a uniform because enemy soldiers came down your street and you’re not in the military and you decided to fight back anyway, well, that’s entirely, utterly, 100% legal under the rules of war. Period. It is not a war crime, it is not a Geneva violation, it is as legal as possible under the laws of war. (It is, however, technically murder.)
Which also, I might add, makes this kid a legal combatant, despite what our government has imagined up as a category.
All being out of uniform means is that you aren’t subject to the ‘prisoner protections’ under Geneva. You can be questioned, you can be arrested and charged with crimes, etc. You can even be shot via a military trial as a spy. (You still cannot be tortured. No one, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, can be tortured, period.)
Which sorta sounds like what happened, but is not. If he was arrested, if he’s a criminal, well, his crimes took place in Afghanistan, and he should be charged there, under those laws, and given a trial for murder. The military could have killed him on capture, or detained him, or turned him over to an Afghan court, but they sure as hell can’t hold him after the war is over. If I go out and kill some German on the street in Canada, Germany cannot kidnap me and hold me forever.
And generally, as part of a peace settlement, civilian crimes committed against invading soldiers are forgiven. In fact, those crimes usually don’t even come up…it’s part of the casualties of war, and the invading party accepts them as such. Meanwhile, the local government usually don’t prosecute people for killing enemy soldiers, even if it was technically ‘murder’.
The fact we’ve apparently decided to do that, except, you know, not via any court, and without any conceivable jurisdiction, is just utterly insane.
DavidTC
Oh, and most of the examples here are backwards. It’s one thing for a country to prosecute civilians helping the invaders. If those civilians are their citizens, that’s treason, and if it’s other country’s civilians, they’re spies. Governments can certainly arrest people for those things, and, usually, under military law, just shoot them.
What happened here is that civilians were helping the government in resisting the invaders, which usually doesn’t result in anything at all. They kill enemy soldiers, if they get caught, they get shot, or interrogated. (Again, not tortured.) The government looks the other way if civilians are running around killing enemy soldiers.
It’s part of war. After the war, whoever wins, well, everyone just considers that part of the peace treaty, and them as acting as sort of ‘unofficial soldiers’. Any who were detained (and not killed) just get released. Sometimes, rarely, if the invaders win, they’ll track down their attackers and prosecute them under the occupation government they set up, but that’s not that common…and isn’t what happened here at all.