GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Two days after he was pulled unconscious from the rubble of a bombed Al Qaeda compound in southern Afghanistan, 15-year-old Omar Khadr lay strapped to a gurney, his left eye blinded by shrapnel, gunshot wounds to his back still raw.
U.S. agents who conducted the first interrogation of the Canadian teen at Bagram air base near Kabul on July 29, 2002, gauged the effects of their questioning by the blood pressure meter attached to their inert subject. The injured teen could do little more than grunt.
The latest, and possibly last, sessions of the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal have revealed disturbing details about how Khadr was treated during three months at Bagram in the custody of U.S. forces who were convinced he had thrown a grenade that killed an American soldier.
Subsequent interrogations during more than six years in U.S. custody have involved snarling dogs, "stress positions" and being upended by guards and used as a human mop to clean the floor.
Khadr is one of at least a dozen juveniles captured and brought to Guantanamo in the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism. Among the 19 Guantanamo prisoners charged with war crimes, Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan thought to be a year younger than the Canadian, are the only ones who were juveniles at the time of their alleged offenses.
Human rights advocates consider the prosecution of Khadr and Jawad another blot on the Guantanamo prison and tribunal. Neither was accorded the protections promised by treaties the U.S. signed.
"Under international law, adults who recruit children for combat are to be prosecuted for that offense. But the children caught up in combat are to be protected, not prosecuted," said Diane Marie Amann, a UC Davis law professor who observed the latest hearing in Khadr's case for the National Institute of Military Justice.
The institute joined legal scholars, parliamentarians and human rights proponents in arguing in amicus briefs that underage combatants should be treated as victims, not responsible adults who made conscious decisions to join the fight.
Khadr's trial is set to begin Jan. 26, with pretrial hearings starting on the eve of the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to shut Guantanamo.
Khadr was a toddler when his father began shuttling his family between Toronto and the Islamic militant strongholds along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
