The photographs taken by U.S. soldiers as they stormed the bombed-out compound show Khadr lying facedown in the dirt under the blasted remnants of a roof. The soldiers didn't know he was there until one stepped on rubble and felt something underneath give way.
Kuebler said Khadr could hardly have thrown the grenade that killed Speer if he was buried and unconscious when the Delta Force soldier entered.
Guantanamo supporters defend Khadr's treatment. The tribunal's chief prosecutor, Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, dismisses critics' contentions that juveniles are prohibited from being held accountable for war crimes by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and a supplemental protocol.
"The convention is misunderstood, if not intentionally misrepresented," Morris said.
"It is not a bar to prosecution."
Army Capt. Keith Petty, on the prosecution team in Khadr's case, said it was up to military jurors at sentencing to consider a convict's age at the time of the offense.
Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. special representative for children in armed conflict, lodged a protest over Khadr's prosecution, warning that it could set a precedent and undermine the protections intended by the convention.
U.N. tribunals established to prosecute alleged war criminals from Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Rwanda have tended to treat child soldiers as victims. David Crane, a Syracuse University law professor who served as chief prosecutor in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, wrote that "no child had the mental capacity to commit mankind's most serious crimes."
Canadian politicians have resisted calls to bring Khadr to his homeland for trial, though Kuebler hopes the impending change of U.S. administrations will apply new pressure on Ottawa to demand the repatriation of Guantanamo's last Western detainee.
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carol.williams@latimes.com
