Omar Khadr

According to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict), to which the United States has been a signatory since January 23, 2003, juvenile prisoners — those under the age of 18 when their alleged crimes took place — “require special protection.” [...]

On Sunday, the Pentagon admitted that 12 juveniles — those under the age of 18 at the time their alleged crimes took place — have been held at Guantánamo Bay (as opposed to the figure of eight that was submitted to the UN in May). But a RAW STORY count, drawn from the Pentagon’s own [...]

As Barack Obama and his transition team begin looking at ways to fulfill the President-Elect’s pledge to close Guantánamo, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, recalls that Barack Obama also promised to “reject the Military Commissions Act” (the legislation that revived the system of “terror trials” conjured up in the Office of Vice President [...]

Hardly a day goes by without some extraordinary news from the Military Commissions, the system of “terror trials” conceived in the Office of the Vice President in November 2001, and their days now seem to be as numbered as those of the Bush administration itself.
Following the outspoken resignation of former prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld [...]

When is a child not a child? Apparently, when he is Omar Khadr, a 15-year old Canadian who was shot in the back after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. Omar has been in US custody ever since, first at a prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, and for the last six years in [...]

Today, Omar Khadr, the sole Canadian citizen in Guantánamo, marks his 22nd birthday in isolation. Seized in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old, Omar has now spent nearly a third of his life in US custody, in conditions that ought to be shameful to the US administration responsible for holding him, and to [...]

One month ago, when the jury in the first US war crimes trial since the Second World War found Salim Hamdan guilty of providing material support for terrorism, but not guilty of conspiracy, the US administration regarded it as a victory, even though numerous commentators — myself included — remained profoundly critical of the entire [...]

I don’t normally cross-post articles from other sites, but I was moved by this article, in which Moazzam Begg, author, former Guantánamo prisoner, and spokesman for the British human rights group Cageprisoners, recalls the time he spent with Omar Khadr in the US prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan, in 2002, when Omar, who was severely [...]

As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrates, a photo is worth a thousand words — even if, as Errol Morris’ newly-released documentary Standard Operating Procedure demonstrates, those words are sometimes what the viewer wishes to see, rather than what actually happened.
There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about the first ever release of images from [...]

As a 16th prisoner at Guantánamo, Noor Uthman Muhammed, is put forward for trial by Military Commission (the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” invented in the wake of the 9/11 attacks), Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, provides a guide to the [...]