America and Obama Hit Bottom: Pressuring Child Soldier to
Plead Guilty to Murder Violates International Law and
Basic Common Decency
01 November 2010By Dave Lindorff
As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St.
Martin's Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime
that I would see a president reach the depth of moral
decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but
sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has
managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former
Constitutional law professor, he knows better.
This president's moral nadir was hit yesterday, when
he allowed a military tribunal based at Guantanamo to
pressure Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured, gravely
wounded, and arrested at the age of 15 in Afghanistan,
and held at at Guantanamo now for nine years, to plead
guilty to murder.
Khadr's crime? He was in a house that was struck by a
US air strike and then raided by US special forces
during the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002. The
gravely wounded Khadr was accused of tossing a grenade
at advancing US troops, which killed US Army Sgt. 1st
Class Christopher Speer, and caused another soldier to
lose an eye.
Omar Khadr at age 15, the time of his capture by US
forces
Although Khadr, after nine years of harsh confinement
at Guantanamo, and facing a military tribunal, has
pleaded guilty in a plea bargain, after insisting for
nine years that he did not throw the grenade (there is
no living witness to his having done so), one issue
here is that even if he did toss it, that action would
have been seen as that heroic act of a gravely-wounded
young fighter facing a superior enemy force, but for
the fact that the US is claiming Khadr was not a
legitimate soldier, but rather a "terrorist."
This is a rather spurious claim, since the US says it
went to "war" in Afghanistan to go after Al Qaeda
forces there, who had been set up with CIA assistance
initially to help the Mujahadeen fight the Soviet
occupiers. So the force that Khadr was supposedly
fighting with was a legitimate fighting force once,
but became not a fighting force when the enemy was the
US. Clearly, such fine distinctions would have meant
nothing to a 15-year-old boy who had been "drafted"
into the war at 14 by his Al Qaeda-member father, who
was later killed by US fire. Note too that the US can
say its soldiers, who have been killing a prodigious
number of civilians in Afghanistan, cannot be charged
with murder or manslaughter because they are soldiers,
but the enemy they are fighting can be charged with
murder if they fight back, because they are supposedly
not legitimate soldiers.
But Alice-in-Wonderland semantic games aside, in any
case, the biggest outrage in this case is that Khadr
was 15 when he was captured. Under the Optional
Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the
Child, a treaty that was signed by the US and that is
thus part of US law, all children under the age of 18
captured while fighting in wars are to be offered
"special protection" and treated as victims, not as
combatants.
The "special treatment" afforded to Khadr after his
capture, however, was to be tortured, as has been
recounted even by US military witnesses, who have
described his being chained with his arms above his
head, despite being seriously wounded, threatened with
rape, interrogated only hours after being operated on
for his wounds, kept in solitary confinement, and so
on.
This is simply a disgusting case that offends any
sense of decency, and makes both America and this
president look no better than Iraq under Saddam
Hussein.
When Barack Obama was running for president, he vowed
to shut down the concentration camp at Guantanamo. He
has not done that. He said, furthermore, that the very
existence of that facility was harming America's image
around the world. He was absolutely correct.
How outrageous then that he not only left the offshore
prison in place but that for the first test of his new
supposedly "fair" military tribunal process, he
allowed the military prosecutors to choose the now
24-year-old Khadr.
Khadr should have been immediately released and
repatriated to his native Canada when the president
took office. Instead he now faces more time imprisoned
at Guantanamo (he may eventually be released to
Canadian authorities under the terms of his plea
agreement, which has not been disclosed yet, but would
face at least another year in Guantanamo's hell).
There is no good way to spin this atrocity. President
Obama now stands guilty of a war crime--the abuse of a
child soldier. Khadr's initial arrest and torture
happened on Bush's watch, but of course, as with the
rest of the torture that occurred during the
Bush/Cheney years, President Obama has done nothing to
prosecute the criminals who engaged in it or ordered
it, or allowed it to happen. That dereliction of duty
in itself by the current commander in chief, under the
Geneva Conventions, is a war crime.
But all legal arguments aside, it is simply an
abomination that this president has allowed the
Pentagon to prosecute and force an admission of
"guilt" from a child soldier who has literally grown
up in the hellish environs of Guantanamo's
concentration camp.
The guilty plea is a bad joke, designed to put
lipstick on the ugly pig that is the president's war
tribunal policy. As Khadr's attorney said, "There's
not much choice. He either pleads guilty to avoid
trial, or he goes to trial (in a military tribunal
where the jury is composed of US military officers),
and the trial is an unfair process." Military
tribunals, significantly, allow testimony that has
been obtained through torture, while such evidence is
inadmissible in any American court of law.
When I wrote The Case for Impeachment, I warned that
if Congress did not impeach the president and vice
president for their myriad crimes, including massive
serial violations of the Geneva Conventions, any
future president would feel completely free to
continue committing those crimes.
In the Khadr case, we see that very thing happening.
Our leaders, from the president on down, are moral
reprobates and war criminals, and as we Americans
allow this kind of grotesque violation of our
fundamental principals to occur without protest, we
become no different from or better than the Germans of
World War II.
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