Still more on Omar Khadr

jeralyn at talkleft pointed me to this piece from the june 23, 2005, toronto star...

Canada's only known detainee in Guantanamo Bay is 18-year-old Omar Khadr. Documents filed in a Canadian court this week included two psychiatric assessments that concluded the teenager has a serious mental disorder and is at a high risk for suicide.

Khadr is the second youngest son of Ahmed Said Khadr, who was considered before his death in 2003 to be Canada's highest-ranking Al Qaeda financier with close ties to Osama bin Laden.

Omar Khadr was 15 when he was shot three times and captured at a suspected Al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in July 2002, following a gun battle with U.S. troops.

In February, his U.S. lawyer told reporters the teenager had been used as a human mop to clean urine on the floor and had been beaten, threatened with rape and tied up for hours in painful positions at Guantanamo Bay.

that would explain the low affect described in my earlier post...

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More on the dismissal of charges against Khadr

we need to keep reminding ourselves that these people are human beings like us, with faces, feelings, and mothers who love them...



This is a photo of Omar Khadr,
taken before he was imprisoned,
handed out by his mother Maha
Khadr following a news conference
in Toronto on Feb. 9, 2005.
(AP Photo)

i posted on this as it was breaking, before i got my hands on the story of the reasons behind the dismissal...

The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the ruling in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system. The ruling immediately raised questions about whether the U.S. will have to further revise procedures for prosecuting prisoners, leading to major delays.

[...]

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw the Khadr case out because he had been classified as an "enemy combatant" by a military panel years earlier — and not as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant."

this is a tragedy of epic proportions... he spends five friggin' years in guantánamo, he's exposed to whatever horrors that place can dish out, his development is arrested, and he's probably suffering from serious emotional and mental distress... just read this and tell me if the lack of emotional affect strikes you as that of an emotionally healthy young man...

Khadr — who according to his former military attorney, Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey has the emotional age of a 16-year-old after five years imprisonment — seemed oblivious to the ruling. Khadr calmly watched the judge throw out the case — looking not at Brownback but at a computer screen at the defense table that showed a live TV broadcast of the proceedings. Khadr could see himself on the screen.

how very sad and how similar to jose padilla... what in god's name happens to them there...?

affect
n. (ăf'ĕkt')

1. Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language: “The soldiers seen on television had been carefully chosen for blandness of affect” (Norman Mailer).

and, after all THAT, they're gonna KEEP HIM THERE...!

But Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured after a deadly firefight in Afghanistan and who is now 20, will remain at the remote U.S. military base along with some 380 other men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

this is totally and completely outrageous...

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