Torture Is Finally Mentioned on the Last Day of Omar Khadr's Sentencing Hearing at Guantanamo

Everything about the last week's events at Guantanamo has been deeply disturbing. On Monday, in defiance of international obligations
requiring the rehabilitation of child prisoners, the US government --
under President Obama -- fulfilled the deepest wishes of the Bush
administration, and persuaded Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, to plead guilty
to charges of murder in violation of the laws of war, attempted murder,
spying, conspiracy, and providing material support to terrorism, in a
plea deal that apparently involves an eight-year sentence, with Khadr
serving one more year at Guantanamo before being returned to Canada.

At the heart of the plea deal is a 50-point "Stipulation of Fact" (PDF),
signed by Khadr and stating that he "does not have any legal defense to
any of the offenses to which he is pleading guilty," in which, despite
his previous protestations to the contrary, he accepted that he threw a
grenade that killed Delta Force Sgt. Christopher Speer on the day of his
capture, and, moreover, that he was, at the time, an "alien
unprivileged enemy belligerent," who did not have "any legal basis to
commit any war-like acts" at all.

As part of the Bush administration's apparently successful rewriting
of international law -- facilitated by President Obama and lawmakers in
Congress -- Khadr was therefore obliged not only to forego further
complaints about his age at the time of his capture, and the
responsibility of others for indoctrinating him, but also to accept that
he had been captured in circumstances in which it was impossible for
him to be a legitimate combatant.

He was also required to stay silent in the face of compelling
evidence that these dubious-sounding war crimes to which he signed his
name were not in fact war crimes at all, and were only invented by
Congress in 2006, as former Guantanamo military defense attorney Lt.
Col. David Frakt explained last summer.
In addition, he also had to overlook the fact that, when the
Commissions were revived last year, defense secretary Robert Gates added
a new twist to the fictional war crimes so that, as Lt. Col. Frakt explained in April this year, "a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war."

This was Lt. Col. Frakt's full explanation of this particular point:

In the new [Military Commissions] Manual the following
official comment has been included in explanation of the offense of
Murder in Violation of the Law of War: "an accused may be convicted in a
military commission ... if the commission finds that the accused engaged
in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying;
murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of
privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the
international law of war." Astoundingly, according to the Pentagon,
a detainee may be convicted of murder in violation of the law of war
even if they did not actually violate the law of war.

However, rather than dwelling on these profoundly disturbing truths
about the nature of Khadr's "crimes," the significance of his age at the
time of his capture, and the pressure he was put under to reverse the
implacable opposition to a plea deal that he demonstrated in summer,
the media, for the most part, allowed themselves last week to be
ushered into the next stage of the game: a week of sentencing hearings,
involving witnesses called by the prosecution and the defense, to enable
a seven-person military jury to deliver its own sentence, which,
bizarrely, will mean nothing unless the jurors deliver a sentence
shorter than the one agreed in secret as part of the plea deal.

As I reported in a previous article,
the government took full advantage of this platform to summon a
purported psychiatric expert, Michael Welner, who in fact delivered an
Islamophobic tirade and threw out provocative soundbites that were
snapped up by a sensation-hungry journalists -- describing Khadr as,
amongst other things, "Al-Qaeda royalty" and "highly dangerous" -- and
also summoned a soldier wounded in the firefight and Tabitha Speer, the
widow of Sgt. Speer.

One of the few commentators to pick up on this particularly manipulative choice of witnesses was Thomas Walkom of the Toronto Star,
who, with reference to Tabitha Speer's testimony, wrote in his column
today, "While heart-wrenching, her testimony glided over the queerest
irony of this case -- that after a pitched battle between clearly
delineated forces, in which soldiers on both sides killed, only one
person from one side ended up accused of murder." (Walkom ended his
column by noting that, when Khadr eventually returns to Canada, the
government "will ignore, as almost everyone seems to ignore, the
absurdity of prosecuting a soldier for killing his enemy in battle").

Khadr's defense team managed to secure a few important witnesses,
including Navy Capt. Patrick McCarthy, the former top military legal
adviser at Guantanamo, who called Khadr respectful, pleasant and
friendly, and added, "Fifteen-year-olds, in my opinion, should not be
held to the same level of accountability as adults." In addition, as the
Edmonton Journal
reported today, his defense team drew on correspondence between Khadr
and Arlette Zink, a teacher in Canada. She has corresponded with Khadr
for the last two years, and has been encouraging him in his voracious
appetite for literature, and, echoing Capt. McCarthy, she described him
as a "polite, thoughtful, intelligent person."

For the most part, however, Khadr's lawyers were hobbled by their
inability to dwell on the fundamental problems with the trial mentioned
above, and also by the judge's refusal to let them discuss another
deeply disturbing aspect of Khadr's story -- the torture and abuse to
which he was subjected, at least in the first two years of his
imprisonment.

Back in May, I discussed some of the claims made by Khadr, as described in an affidavit submitted in February 2008 (PDF), in an article entitled, "The Torture of Omar Khadr, a Child in Bagram and Guantanamo," in which I explained how

[Khadr] described his mistreatment in detail, explaining
how he was unconscious for a week after his capture, when he was
severely wounded, and how, in Bagram, where he was taken after just two
weeks in a hospital, his interrogations began immediately, at the hands
of an interrogator who manipulated his injuries (the exact details were
redacted from his affidavit). Crucially, he also explained how, as soon
as he regained consciousness, "the first soldier told me that I had
killed an American with a grenade," and how, during his first
interrogation at Bagram, "I figured out right away that I would simply
tell them whatever I thought they wanted to hear in order to keep them
from causing me [redacted]."

As I also explained:

There is much more in the affidavit -- casual cruelty,
whereby guards made Khadr do hard manual labor when his wounds were not
healed, and, significantly, threats "to have me raped, or sent to other
countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped." He also
noted, "I would always hear people screaming, both day and night," and
explained that other prisoners were scared of his interrogator. "Most
people would not talk about what had been done to them," he declared.
"This made me afraid."

Khadr also described what happened to him in Guantanamo, where, as I explained [in a previous article],
he "arrived around the time that a regime of humiliation, isolation and
abuse, including extreme temperature manipulation, forced nudity and
sexual humiliation, had just been introduced, by reverse-engineering torture techniques,
used in a military program designed to train US personnel to resist
interrogation if captured, in an attempt to increase the meager flow of
'actionable intelligence' from the prison."

At various points in 2003, while the use of these techniques was
still widespread, Khadr stated that he was short-shackled in painful
positions and left for up to ten hours in a freezing cold cell,
threatened with rape and with being transferred to another country where
he could be raped, and, on one particular occasion, when he had been
left short-shackled in a painful position until he urinated on himself,
"Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me, and then, with
me lying on my stomach and my hands and feet cuffed together behind me,
the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of
urine and pine oil on the floor. Later, I was put back in my cell,
without being allowed a shower or a change of clothes. I was not given a
change of clothes for two days. They did this to me again a few weeks
later."

Crucially, when describing the interrogations that punctuated these
experiences at Guantanamo, Khadr explained, "I did not want to expose
myself to any more harm, so I always just told interrogators what I
thought they wanted to hear. Having been asked the same questions so
many times, I knew what answers made interrogators happy and would
always tailor my answers based on what I thought would keep me from
being harmed."

Given the well-chronicled accounts of torture and abuse in Bagram and Guantanamo, including two murders in Bagram
just months after Khadr was held there, and the official implementation
of reverse-engineered torture techniques at Guantanamo in 2002 (which
continued until 2004), it was disturbing that the judge in Khadr's case,
Army Col. Patrick Parrish, brushed over allegations of abuse and of
rape threats that surfaced in pre-trial hearings in May (which I
described in the article mentioned above), for two reasons. The first is
because it keeps hidden from view the long and often brutal history of
the Bush administration's detention policies in the "War on Terror," as
experienced by everyone held at Guantanamo and in other Bush-era
prisons, and the second is because it specifically deprived Khadr of
the opportunity to remind jurors -- and the wider world -- of the pressure
he was put under to confess to the "crimes" of which he was accused.

On Friday, the defense team finally managed to mention the abusive
conditions in which Khadr was held in Bagram, when one of his lawyers,
Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, read out an unsworn statement
by Khadr relating to an exchange he had with Joshua Claus, who, at the
time, was a sergeant in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion. Claus
later served a five-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in a
court martial to the abuse of an unidentified prisoner at Bagram, who
was made "to roll back and forth on the floor and kiss the boots of his
interrogator," as Michelle Shephard described it in the Toronto Star, and also for his part in the murder of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver whe died in Bagram in December 2002.

As Claus conceded in May, he had come up with a scenario to terrify
Khadr, which involved him being sent to a US prison and gang-raped, and
the following statement by Khadr, describing his response to this
threat, was the defense team's last submission on Friday. It remains to
be seen if it will sway the jury in any way as the jurors make their deliberations this weekend,
deciding between, on the one hand, prosecutor Jeff Groharing's
description of Khadr as "a terrorist and a murderer," who should be
given a 25-year sentence, and, on the other, Lt. Col. Jackson's
description of him as a "child with a bad dad," who "was radicalized as a
child and has matured and changed while in US custody." In his final
words to the jury, Jackson said, "This case is about giving Omar Khadr a
first chance because he's never had it. Send him back to Canada, let
him start his education and career. There is no good for him here. Send
him home."

Omar Khadr's unsworn statement about the rape threat he received in Bagram

I ask that you consider this letter about what happened to me at
Bagram in 2002. It is hard for me to talk about. I know it does not
change what I did but I hope you will think about it when punishing me.

At first I did not tell them my interrogators what really happened.
My main interrogator, Interrogator #1 [Sgt. Claus], told me he knew I
was lying. He told me that it was fine if I did not tell him the truth.
He told me a story about a young Afghan who lied to him. He told me they
thought the Afghan guy had not done anything seriously wrong. But they
sent him to an American prison for lying to Americans.

He told me a story about an Afghan getting sent to an American
prison, and he said there's a bunch of, you know, big black guys and,
you know, the big Nazis are there, and they noticed this little Afghan
who doesn't speak their language. He, you know, he prays five times a
day; he's got to be a Muslim. Remember, they're Americans. They're still
kind of upset and mad about the September 11th attacks, so, you know,
they're still patriotic even though they're inmates. And the guards,
they do everything they can to protect this little guy and keep him out
of harm's way, but, you know, nobody could be everywhere at once. Things
happen. We don't want things to happen, especially to anybody, and this
poor little kid, we couldn't clear out. You know, he's like 20 years
old. He's kind of scared. He's away from home; kind of isolated, you
know, no one can really understand him.

It would be unfortunate that, you know -- that apparently one time he
was in the shower by himself and these four big black guys, they showed
up in prison. They said, hey, we know all about you Muslims. You
attacked the country. And we didn't want anything to happen to this kid.
We just wanted him to talk to us, but he decided he wanted to lie and
didn't want to be straight with us. And it's terrible that something
would happen but, you know, they caught him in the shower and they raped
him and, you know, it was terrible. This kid got hurt. And we think he
ended up dying but we're not quite sure.

This story scared me very much and made me cry. Interrogator #3 was also there and he saw the whole thing happen.

Signed Omar A. Khadr