April 8, 2008

The U.S. court will soon decide whether a Canadian boy is an
enemy combatant guilty of war crimes.   Or was he a victim of
adult coercion - - a child soldier?

Contradictions swirl about and the events that happened in
2002 when Omar Khadr was only15 years old but it seems by
all reasonable accounts that he is innocent.

But for a moment, let's assume the charges are true; that
Khadr murdered a U.S. soldier on the battlefield in
Afghanistan.

How could one soldier be convicted of murdering another when
killing each other is what soldiers are expected to do, and
they may be punished if they don't?  That seems to be a
problem admits John Bellinger, a legal advisor for the U.S.
state department. "In a normal war, where both sides have
the right to engage in combat with one another, if a soldier
kills a soldier on the other side, it's not murder."

But, says Bellinger, Khadr's case is different because he
was a member of a terrorist group and it's illegal for them
to engage in war. Under U.S. law it's illegal for al-Qaeda
or the Taliban to even defend themselves. How convenient.
The U.S. enacted a law that prohibits soldiers in
Afghanistan from defending themselves against invasion; an
invasion that itself was illegal under international law
since Afghanistan had neither threatened attack nor declared
war on the U.S. And the law makes members of that group
guilty of war crimes.

It gets more bizarre. The law making al-Qaeda and the
Taliban soldiers into enemy combatants was enacted after
Khadr's alleged deed. Even in the unlikely event that the
15-year-old Omar knew the subtle nuances and protocols of
military engagement, he could not have known that the
actions of that day would be illegal under a future law.

Bizarre law aside, even the facts are in doubt. The U.S.
military claims that Omar threw a grenade at a U.S. soldier,
killing him. Now an eye-witness paints a different
picture; the teenager was in the company of an adult who
threw the grenade. Khadr was down on his knees facing away
from battle when a U.S. soldier shot him twice in the back.
Let me see if I've got the charges straight: a U.S. soldier
legally shot a combatant in the back while the combatant
illegally defended himself while unarmed and down on his
knees?

The tortured path that brought Omar Khadr to the battlefield
was a similar path taken by the world's child soldiers
except that usually children are forcibly taken from their
parents and taught how to kill. In Khadr's case, his family
groomed him for war.

A strong case can be made that Omar was brainwashed by his
family into thinking that he had no other choice. From age
11, Omar's tutorage into the world of terror started with
trips to Afghanistan. It's a family tradition. One of his
bothers became suicide bomber, another paralyzed in a battle
in which his father was killed. His mother and sister
praised the glories of terrorism on national television.
Writer Sean Fine says: "Only an extraordinary 15-year-old
could have withstood that grooming process (Globe and Mail,
March 22)".

The silence of the Canadian government has been deafening.
Other countries have repatriated citizens held as combatants
at Guantanamo Bay, several in the case of Britain, but not
Canada. The only "help" that the Canadian government has
provided is to send intelligence officers to interrogate
Omar without counsel, and pass the information on the U.S.
in order to strengthen their case.

With help like that, it makes me wonder that if I were
arrested under false charges in a foreign country I would be
better off not asking for assistance from my government.

Kadar's lawyers rightfully claim that these interrogations
without counsel are illegal. They recently and went to
Canada's Supreme Court to obtain the results of that
interrogation but have been stonewalled by the Canadian
government which steadfastly stands behind the U.S. military
even in the face of evidence pointing to injustice of a
Canadian citizen in U.S. courts.

Instead of being complicit in the U.S. prosecution of a
juvenile in what appears to an inevitable miscarriage of
justice, why doesn't Prime Minister Stephen Harper do the
right thing and bring Kadar home?

Harper seems confident that Khadr will get a fair trial in
the U.S.  I'm not so sure.

David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca

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