Desperate Pentagon files new charge against Omar Khadr, Guantánamo’s child soldier

Never ones to willingly admit defeat, officials at the Pentagon have responded to the recent collapse of the Military Commissions for Omar Khadr and Salim Hamdan by alleging that Khadr, who was just 15 years old at the time of his capture, after a gun battle in Afghanistan in July 2002, “related,” just a few weeks after, “that he had been told about a $1,500 reward being placed on the head of each American killed.” Although it was not made clear who had offered the bounty, Khadr allegedly replied to questions about how he felt about the reward by saying, “I wanted to kill a lot of American[s] to get lots of money.”

Astutely recognizing desperation when they see it, his lawyers have pointed out that this supposedly significant information has not been mentioned at all during the last five years, and have suggested, as Canada’s Globe and Mail reports, that it is “suspect, ‘superfluous’ to the appeal motion and designed to undermine public sympathy” for Khadr. His military lawyer, Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler, told the Globe and Mail, “We’re not inclined to believe reports about what Omar said to interrogators,” adding that “the government seeks to vilify Omar based on information it coerced out of him as a 15-year-old boy recovering from critical wounds inflicted by US forces. It shows how desperate they are.”

Nathan Whitling, one of Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, has also spoken out, explaining to the Globe and Mail that his client’s companions had already been killed by US air strikes when a grenade –- allegedly thrown by Khadr –- killed a US soldier, Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer. He continued: “It is hardly convincing for the US to suggest that in the midst of this battle, and after the entire site had been flattened by 500-pound bombs and everyone else in the compound [had been] killed, Omar was lying under the rubble thinking about how to earn himself $1,500.”

As one respondent to the Globe and Mail’s article noted, “The case against Mr. Khadr, what there was of it, is descending into farce. He was a 15 year-old child soldier. He’s been incarcerated in solitary confinement for years, under heavy mental, emotional and physical strain. By now he’s probably confessed to assassinating JFK for the Cuban mob. If and when Mr. Khadr’s case gets into the civil courts, even the US civil courts, they will throw it so hard it will bounce.”

Omar Khadr (left) during his aborted Military Commission hearing on 4 June 2007. The judge who threw out his case and has refused to reinstate it, Army Colonel Peter Brownback, sits on the far right (©AFP/Getty Images).

For more on Omar Khadr, see my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.