Feel The Pride, America!
The treatment of Omar Khadr is an example of the monsters we have become in our War on Terror. Born in 1988 in Toronto, Khadr was raised by two, insane Muslim parents. They spent every moment preparing him for Jihad, telling him suicide bombers were the bestest of the best.
Omar's father always said he did not want to die in bed. He wanted to be killed. When his children were very young, he told them, "If you love me, pray that I will get martyred." Three times he asked Omar's older brother Abdurahman to become a suicide bomber. It would bring honor to the family, he said. Abdurahman declined. Later, when Ahmed sensed that Abdurahman's faith was weakening, he told him, "If you ever betray Islam, I will be the one to kill you."
Sounds like my old man -- except he made me play baseball.
When Omar was two, the family moved to Pakistan. In 1992, the family moved back to Canada for three years because Dad stepped on a land mine and needed to recover. Shit happens during a Jihad, yo. Omar's father raised money for Al Qaeda and sent Khadr to get formal military training before he was 12. He spent most of his formative years in Al Qaeda camps and even spent time with Osama bin Laden in Jalalabad.
When the US attacked Afghanistan, Omar was fighting with the Taliban. Well, sort of fighting. At 14, his job was to wash clothes and cook for the actual fighters. On July 27, 2002, Khadr was sent to the village of Ab Khail to translate for Taliban fighters at a gathering. American forces arrived and a firefight broke out.
Khadr was captured and charged with throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer. The Pentagon said that Khadr was the only one who could have killed Speer, because he was the only person alive at that point. Of course, the Pentagon was lying.
However, a classified document, inadvertently released to reporters at the military prison by a Pentagon official Monday, provides a different eyewitness account of the events.
A U.S. soldier at the battle said in sworn testimony that two al-Qaeda fighters were alive after the fatal grenade attack.
The unidentified soldier says he killed the first al-Qaeda fighter before spotting Khadr, whom he said was wounded, on his knees and facing away from him. For reasons he does not go into, he says he shot him in the back twice.
Khadr was 15 on that day. Check him out in all his glory.
The shooting left him blind in one eye. And Khadrs fucked up life was only about to become a lot worse. Raised by animals, who filled his mind with poison and attempted to turn him into a killing machine, Khadr saw one way out.
"Kill me," he murmured, in fluent English. "Please, just kill me."
No can do. We have to torture you and make you go crazy. Khadr was patched up and sent to Guantanamo for some civilized American treatment.
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.
How about a little more detail?
Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they'd successfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.
In 2004, the U.S. called him an enemy combatant in a Summary of Evidence memo that was prepared for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. A judge tossed the case out last year.
A judge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruled June 4 that Omar Khadr's case could not go forward because a military tribunal had merely determined he was an "enemy combatant" and because the judge believed he could not make such a determination of "unlawful" status.
The new Court of Military Commission Review has ordered a military judge to reopen the terrorism case against a 20-year-old Canadian accused of killing a U.S. serviceman in Afghanistan, ruling that the judge's decision earlier this year to dismiss the case was in error.
In a 25-page opinion issued last night, a three-member panel of the court decided that judges in military commissions can determine whether terror suspects are "unlawful enemy combatants" and are therefore subject to trial
But just to make sure there are no further problems, Khadr is now an "unprivileged belligerent." Unprivileged belligerents apparently don't have the right to wage war.
I am constantly amazed at our retardation and incredible lack of humanity. I am, however, no longer amazed by our constant defying of our own laws and treaties.
In December 2002, the United States ratified a treaty that establishes 18 as the minimum age for any compulsory recruitment or participation in armed conflict. This treaty "the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of Children" obliges governments to assist in the demobilization and rehabilitation of former child soldiers, with a particular responsibility to rehabilitate child soldiers within its jurisdiction.
But hes 20 now, so I wouldnt expect any sympathy from anyone. Hes a product of child abuse, raised by an insane family that tried to turn him into a suicide bomber. He is the reason many countries came together to create child soldier laws. But rather than being civilized, we have gone the other way. We have justified every lie Omars parents ever told him. We have erased any doubt he may have had that America must be destroyed. And we have given up any right to condemn another country when they torture our soldiers during war. We are no different than the supposed enemy we fight.
Omar Khadr will have another hearing next week. Maybe we should ask him if he wants to continue to live like a rat, or if he would rather die. But, then, that would show a glimmer of humanity.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Amnesty International currently estimates that there may be as many as 300,000 child soldiers fighting in different wars across the world. When Ishmael Beah was 13, his family was killed during Sierra Leones civil war, and he was forced by the army to become one of these soldiers. Fortunately, not only was he able to escape, he has also written one of the most highly acclaimed books of the year, a memoir of his experiences.
A Long Way Gone is first a story of the absolute worst of humanity, as Beah is forced to kill more people than he can count smoking marijuana, snorting brown-brown, (a combination of cocaine and gunpowder) and watching violent American films with his fellow child soldiers, all to numb his mind to the horrors he is surrounded by -- before he turns 14. When he is rescued by UNICEF, and especially when he flees Sierra Leone for America, the story turns hopeful as he struggles with returning to civilization, something he is still struggling with.
Today, Beah still suffers from memories and bad dreams. "But I've come to terms with them because my life before the war, during the war and after the war all makes me who I am today -- whether I like it or not ... It makes me appreciate life more and it gives me the strength and the passion to do certain things.
Beah also found strength from Laura Simms, a New York divorcee who met him in 1996 when he was brought to the United Nations' International Children's Parliament to speak about child warriors -- a worldwide crisis that's affected an estimated 300,000 children. Sims befriended Beah, sent him money and made it possible for him to immigrate to the United States after he'd returned to Sierra Leone and faced the risk of being re-recruited as a killer. Beah calls her his "mother."
Here is Beah, reading an excerpt from A Long Way Gone: