Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, discusses Omar Khadr‘s plight from when he was a 15 year old battlefield prisoner in Afghanistan to a 24 year old defendant in a Guantanamo courtroom, how Khadr’s guilty plea deal covers up the gaping legal holes in the Military Commissions that a trial would have exposed and how the U.S. ignored international standards of conduct regarding child soldiers.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
So the news this morning is that Omar Khadr has pled guilty at Guantanamo Bay.
But Andy Worthington is the author of the Guantanamo Files, and he's also the director and producer of the documentary Outside the Law.
His website is AndyWorthington.co.uk.
You can find what he writes at Antiwar.com, at the Future Freedom Foundation website FFF.org, and I think also at the Huffington Post and all over the place, right, Andy?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, and Andy is, you know, he's the Brit that we Americans have to turn to to find out the whole truth about what our government is doing to these people down at Guantanamo.
So now we have basically 10 minutes, Andy, so I need you to tell me everything you know about this guy, Omar Khadr, and then what happened today.
Okay, well, you know, the thing is about what happened today is that it's very difficult to work out from this plea deal what the truth actually is, Scott, you know?
I mean, Khadr was, you know, he was seized, half dead, shot in the back after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002.
The other men that he was with all died.
He was subsequently accused of throwing the grenade that killed a US Special Forces soldier.
Now the problem with that story has been various contradictory accounts over the years, some claims that reports of what happened that day were amended after the fact.
You know, Khadr has never said that he threw the grenade, and it always seems to have been very difficult to work out in the kind of confusion of that situation whether it was him or not.
Didn't he, Andy, at one point admit that he threw it, but it was some ridiculous story about how he threw the grenade back over his head like in a movie or something?
He has said something like that.
I mean, you know, it's pretty indicative of the problems of trying to establish the truth after all these years, you know, of getting the exact truth of battlefield situations.
I mean, the bigger problems with Omar Khadr's case all along, of course, have been that he was 15 when he was captured, that he therefore should have been rehabilitated according to the UN protocol on the rights of the child in armed conflict that the US signed in December 2002.
So he'd already been in custody for a few months, but at that point they should have rehabilitated him rather than punishing him.
The problems, of course, even more fundamental problems, perhaps in some ways, Scarcev, these are invented war crimes that he's accused of having committed.
You know, and I think that's really the big problem with what happened today, because we've heard that having turned down a plea deal in summer and having said that he wouldn't, he's obviously either decided himself or has been talked around to accepting that this apparent eight years that he's going to get, one more year in Guantanamo, seven years in Canada is a much better deal than fighting it out through the military commission trial, which could have resulted in him losing and receiving a life sentence.
So you know, the problems that we've got here are that by accepting this plea deal, it looks as though he, you know, and pleading guilty, it looks as though, well, he did it all.
It validates the process.
Whereas this may not be the case.
I mean, he may just have decided that he had to say yes to everything because that was the only way that he was going to escape.
And it's certainly a problem because he's admitted to being an unprivileged enemy belligerent who isn't allowed to fight back against US forces.
You know, he's admitted to merger in violation of the law of war.
This is one of the fundamental invented crimes of the military commissions.
But you know, he can't appeal on a plea.
So the Obama administration gets to tick the boxes that say, this racket that we're running down at Guantanamo is actually fair and legal.
And Canada gets the deal that presumably, you know, means that he doesn't spend the rest of his life in custody.
But I have no idea how much truth there is to any of the statements that he's put his name to saying what he did.
Yeah, well, that's the most important point.
I mean, we all know that people are compelled, if not outright coerced into pleading guilty to crimes that they didn't commit in our so-called legitimate black robe, American flag legal justice system here in the United States.
But when you're talking about a military commission, that's not even a military commission under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
It's not any system left over from World War Two or worked out since the days of George Washington around here or anything.
This is completely made up nonsense that it's basically the same memos created.
This is said that you can torture these people to death if you feel like it, or if you did, then we know that you meant well, and you're just trying to prevent a terrorist attack.
So it's OK.
And look, I'm looking at the CBC.ca news story here, the Canadian news.
And they say that they asked him in court if he conspired with Osama bin Laden and he answered yes.
Now, right now, Andy, do you know of anything in all of your research that would indicate that this guy, Omar Khadr, had ever met Osama bin Laden or was working for him?
Who was this kid was 15 at the time, right?
Well, I mean, the stories are that when he was taken, you know, as a child with his brothers and sisters to live in Afghanistan, they lived in a compound where Osama bin Laden lived as well.
And the children played together.
So, you know, presumably on some basis, he knew Osama bin Laden.
But, you know, I mean, I've never heard this one before.
And you know, I don't honestly know what to make of it.
Like I like I say, I mean, I think fundamentally, the conclusion that we can draw from this is that we have a result, but we're no clearer than we ever before than we ever were before about, you know, the exact determination of what the evidence is and what's accurate and what isn't.
Yeah.
Wow.
So tell me, try to convince me the best you can from the devil's advocate point of view.
Is there any evidence that this kid actually did anything but get shot in the back by an invading army?
Well, apparently, you know, apparently the prosecution did have they had this video film of apparently of him making improvised explosive devices.
You know, he was certainly in the compound on the day that this happened.
You know, the problem with this, again, goes back to the other issue that nobody really wants to talk about.
And this is one of the reasons that the Obama administration, coincidentally, is happy to have avoided a trial.
And it's the fact that they were about to put a juvenile on on war crimes charges, you know, for the first time since the Second World War.
And they had the sense to know that that was going to be a bit embarrassing.
So they've avoided that.
But the question is, the issue of a juvenile prisoner is that, you know, under the age of 18, when the crimes are committed, those people are not held to be responsible for their own actions.
They are acting under the influence of somebody else.
In this case, his father, Ahmed Fayed Kader, who had taken the family out to Afghanistan and Pakistan through their childhood and given them military training and indoctrinated them.
You know, and possibly, if we're to believe this, then possibly, you know, Osama bin Laden at some point had some say on this boy's mentality.
But it's the dividing line between adult responsibility for your actions and when you are subjected to the influence of somebody else.
And the fundamental issue with Ahmed Kader is that he was 15.
And therefore, technically, according to the, you know, to the international treaty signed by the United States and by Canada, he was supposed to be rehabilitated.
He certainly wasn't supposed to be put in some kind of massaged, resurrected version of an abomination of a legal process first thought up by Dick Cheney and then manipulated with invented war crimes by Congress on two occasions.
Well, at least they put it in Cuba so we can see it for what it is, you know?
Yeah, I mean.
Well, let me let me ask you this in the couple minutes we have left here, Andy, tell me what evidence there is and and specifically what evidence there is of any abuse or torture suffered by this juvenile, as you say.
Well, I mean, Omar Kader is always, you know, I mean, there have been reports from his fellow prisoners of how brutally he was treated in Bagram when he was held there.
And I think I think one of his former guards is on record as saying that he tried to look after him in that period.
But there have also been reports from him.
I mean, these can't be independently verified, but there are reports from him which certainly fit with other reports, you know, significant number of reports from Guantanamo that he was subjected to, you know, this pretty brutal regime of isolation and humiliation.
Well, wasn't there a testimony at a hearing by one of his guards that the first time I ever saw Omar Kader, he was hanging from the wall like a Dungeon of Farsight cartoon or something?
Yeah, I mean, I think that was tried to be, you know, I think the person responsible tried to make that out as less significant than it was.
But you know, I think you're probably right that you picked up on that as well.
You know, that doesn't sound like everyday behavior.
That sounds like something pretty abusive going on.
And I think it's pretty clear, although, you know, obviously.
The prosecution side would argue about this, but I think it's pretty clear that he was subjected to the same kind of abuse that a lot of prisoners in Guantanamo were subjected to.
And all along, of course, he was just a child.
Right.
So that doesn't mean that he necessarily had his torture choreographed by Condoleezza Rice and them like Al Qahtani.
But it means this basically systematic abuse that was delivered upon all of those guys.
Yeah.
Well, no, absolutely.
Scott.
Thank you so much for doing this.
Well, we're all out of time.
I really appreciate you making time, especially on such short notice to do the show.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's not better news, but there we go.
Yeah.
Well, it's our job to call the score on the way to hell, pal.
That's all we can do.
All right, everybody.
Check out Andy Worthington dot co dot uk fff dot org antiwar dot com.
The Guantanamo Files is the book.
Thanks again, bud.
