Canada ’s role in the persecution of chi ld soldier Omar Khadr

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Canada’s role in the persecution of child soldier Omar Khadr
30 October 2010

The War Commission trial of child-soldier Omar Khadr and the plea bargain that
the Obama administration and the Pentagon coerced from him this week have been
widely and rightly condemned.

Now just 24 years old, Khadr has spent more than eight years, or over a third of
his life, under US military detention at the notorious Bagram (Afghanistan) and
Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) detention camps. Like the other detainees, the
Canadian-born Khadr was for years in a legal black hole, enduring a
prison-interrogation regime designed to be outside established international and
US law. He was held indefinitely without charge, denied legal representation and
access to the courts, and subjected by his US captors to physical and
psychological abuse, including outright torture.

According to international law, Khadr is a child soldier who should be treated
as a “victim.” He was seized at the age of 15 after a July 2002 firefight in
Khost, Afghanistan, in which US special forces stormed the compound where he was
living. Yet, in an act of vengeance against Khadr’s dead father, who was an
al-Qaeda financier, the Pentagon and US government labeled him an “enemy
combatant” (later “an alien unprivileged belligerent”), illegally incarcerated
him and, five years later, charged him with “war crimes.”

In fact, Khadr’s only crime was to participate in the resistance to the US
invasion of Afghanistan—a criminal enterprise, which like the Iraq War that
followed soon after, was and is aimed at securing the world position of US
imperialism.

Ultimately Khadr was dragged before a drumhead War Commission: a parallel
military-controlled judicial system, created by the George W. Bush and Obama
administrations, where the traditional rules of evidence do not apply.

The crux of the military prosecution’s case against Khadr was his 2002
“confession” that he threw a grenade during the Khost firefight that killed a US
Delta Special Forces soldier. Khadr “gave” this confession while chained to a
bed in the Bagram prison hospital, where he was recovering from life threatening
injuries and a shrapnel wound to an eye, and shortly after a US army
interrogator—who ultimately would be court-martialed for abusing another Bagram
prisoner—threatened to have him gang-raped to death.

In August, at the beginning of Khadr’s trial, the War Commission judge, Colonel
Patrick Parrish, ruled that this confession was voluntary and hence admissible.
The judge similarly ignored evidence that Khadr was subject to sleep deprivation
and other “stress and duress” techniques, curtly dismissing the argument of
Khadr’s military-appointed lawyer that any self-incriminating statements the
military had extracted from the boy “were the product of torture.”

These rulings only served to confirm the kangaroo court character of the War
Commissions. Khadr’s Canadian lawyer reported that when the judge read out his
ruling, Khadr turned to him and said, “We’re embarrassing ourselves by being here.”

With the fix so clearly in and the prospect of multiple life-sentences hanging
over Khadr’s head, his lawyers urged him to accept the plea-bargain offered by
the Obama administration, although they recognized that it and the Pentagon
would seek to use Khadr’s guilty plea to try to legitimize the ordeal to which
they have subjected him and the entire Bagram-Guantanamo abomination.

Under the plea bargain, Khadr will be held in solitary confinement for a year in
Guantanamo Bay, then transferred to a Canadian prison to serve out the remainder
of an eight year jail sentence.

If things have come to this, it was largely because of the role played by the
Canadian government, its agencies and the Canadian courts.

Canada aided and abetted the prosecution and persecution of Khadr, from the time
that Canadian authorities first learned of the detention of a Canadian citizen
at Guantanamo Bay through this week’s plea-bargain.

For years, Khadr has had the dual distinction of being both the youngest
Guantanamo Bay detainee and the sole remaining detainee of a Western country.
Under public pressure, the governments of Britain, Australia and other Western
countries long ago secured the release of their nationals from arbitrary,
indefinite detention and the subsequent War Commission regime.

But Canada, under the Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and Paul Martin and
the current Conservative government of Stephen Harper never asked for, let alone
demanded, Khadr’s release: Not when as a child he was indefinitely detained
without charge. Not when it became public knowledge that his US captors
routinely practiced torture. And not when the US prosecuted him in violation of
an international treaty on child soldiers that Canada has signed and sworn to
uphold.

On the contrary, in 2003-4 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and
Department of Foreign Affairs officials worked hand in glove with Khadr’s US
captors, including conniving in his torture. And Prime Minister Harper
repeatedly voiced his confidence in, and support for, Khadr’s trial by the War
Commissions, that is by military courts established for the express purpose of
circumventing basic standards of evidence.

Earlier this year, Canada’s Supreme Court was forced to concede that Canada had
violated Khadr’s constitutional rights when CSIS agents interrogated him knowing
he had been “softened up” for them through sleep-deprivation torture.

Yet the Supreme Court, demonstrating its indifference to Khadr’s rights and
fate, overturned a lower court ruling instructing Ottawa to seek Khadr’s
repatriation. To order the government to do this, claimed Canada’s highest
court, would unduly impinge on the government’s prerogative to conduct Canada’s
foreign affairs in the “national interest.” In other words, interests of state
trumped Khadr’s fundamental citizenship rights.

Several Canadian media commentators have been forced to acknowledge this week
that Canada has played a shameful role in facilitating and collaborating in Omar
Khadr’s persecution.

But this is by no means an isolated episode. As in all the advanced capitalist
countries, the “war in terror” has been invoked by Canada’s elite to justify
weakening or overturning longstanding limits on state power—such as detention
without charge and the right of silence—and to revive torture as an instrument
of state policy.

There is much evidence to show that Canada’s national security apparatus
developed its own form of rendition in the early years of the last decade. It
incited governments in the Middle East to arrest and interrogate Canadian
citizens travelling abroad, knowing that they would use interrogation techniques
constitutionally prohibited in Canada, including indefinite detention without
trial and torture.

The Canadian government has gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up the
Canadian Armed Forces’ complicity in torture in Afghanistan. Last December, it
shut down parliament for two months to derail a parliamentary investigation into
the issue and this spring it defied a House of Commons resolution instructing it
to turn over to parliament uncensored documents pertaining to the Canadian
military’s Afghan detainees. The latter action compelled the Speaker to rule
that the executive was seeking to subvert parliament’s duty and power to hold
the government to account and thereby threatening the very foundations of
Canadian democracy.

But ultimately the opposition parties capitulated to the government’s insistence
that the Afghan detainee issue be covered up. They agreed to a laborious vetting
process designed to ensure that the Canadian public learns little of the Afghan
detainee affair and only what has been jointly agreed to by the government,
opposition, and a special panel of judges.

In the case of the persecution of Omar Khadr, the opposition’s role has been
equally craven. There has been no attempt to make the case to the Canadian
people that his CSIS interrogation is part of a pattern of Canadian complicity
in torture. Nor has the opposition sought to expose the sinister implications of
the Harper government’s defence of the War Commissions process.

In Canada, as around the world, the ruling elite, gorged on wealth and fearful
for its future, is increasingly indifferent and hostile to democratic rights.
The international working class is the only force with the social power to mount
a struggle to defend and broaden democratic rights and must make this a vital
element of its struggle against capitalist austerity and militarism.

Keith Jones

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/pers-o30.shtml

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