Getting it Wrong in Guantanamo

The government's case was based largely on Omar Khadr's own self-incriminating statements, even though he made them after being tortured.

November 22, 2010 - I was at Guantánamo Bay prison on Halloween. In a ghoulishly fitting coincidence, that was the same day a former child solider was convicted for war crimes for the first time since the end of World War II. Eight years and one day after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantánamo, his military commission case concluded with a plea-bargained sentence of eight more years.

Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was 15 on July 27, 2002, when U.S. forces captured him in an Afghan village following a firefight. His father had sent him to Afghanistan the previous month to translate for an al-Qaeda operative.

Blinded in one eye and shot twice in the chest, the critically wounded teen was airlifted to the American prison in Bagram, where his interrogations began as soon as he regained consciousness. A month after he turned 16, he was shipped to Guantánamo where he, like all detainees, was held for years incommunicado, and continuously interrogated.

Of the 779 people ever imprisoned at Gitmo, only Khadr was charged with a hot war offense. He was accused of throwing a grenade during the firefight that fatally wounded Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer. As of today, 1,309 US soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and 4,427 have been killed in Iraq. Only Khadr has been convicted of killing a soldier in battle--which was never a war crime until the U.S. government reinterpreted the laws of war to prosecute him in the military commissions. {read rest}