Omar Khadr and Justice American-Style

Dear Mr. President,
On February 5 I mentioned a 15-year-old Canadian, Omar Khadr, held at Guantanamo for 10 years and convicted as a war criminal. Recently I discovered he’s still in prison (in Canada), eligible for parole in July and appealing his plea-bargain and war crimes convictions. His confession was the result of torture—first at Bagram and then at Guantanamo. At Bagram, his interrogator was Joshua Claus, one of those responsible for the deaths of 2 detainees at Bagram; later he was at Abu Ghraib during the worst abuses there. In 2005 Claus was found guilty of maltreatment and assault against a detainee who died. Omar, a 15-year-old boy with fresh bullet and shrapnel wounds, blinded in one eye, was denied pain medication, cuffed to his bed in painful positions, hung by his arms from door frames, picked up and dropped to the floor repeatedly, hooded, choked, beaten, threatened with dogs and rape, kept in stress positions until he urinated and then dragged through a mixture of his urine and pine oil and thrown into a cell for days. He was put in frigid cells without blankets, spent weeks in solitary confinement, not segregated from adult prisoners or treated as a child soldier. He was given no opportunity for schooling or counseling, a violation of the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. As I read witness reports, WikiLeaks and court documents, his signed affidavit, news articles, etc., I realized the charges against him—“CONSPIRACY; MURDER BY AN UNPRIVILEGED BELLIGERENT; ATTEMPTED MURDER BY AN UNPRIVILEGED BELLIGERENT; AIDING THE ENEMY”—are circumstantial at best and would never hold up in a real court of law. He’s accused of attending a terrorist training camp, planting IEDs and throwing a grenade that killed an American medic. He may be guilty as charged but there’s no evidence; it’s all speculation, conflicting witness reports and confessions under torture. It’s doubtful Omar threw the grenade that killed the medic; more likely an American did. Omar was severely wounded from air strikes by Apache helicopters and F-18s. He was on his knees in the back corner of a room facing away from the action when a U.S. soldier saw him and shot him twice in the back—one of our American heroes. A Captain was about to order one of his men to kill Omar—another American hero—when he was overruled. Nobody really knows who did what but never mind, they killed and captured militants. Mission accomplished. Justice served. Well, justice American-style, anyway.