On Friday, Omar Khadr (right) appeared before his judges at Guantánamo. As we've posted, Khadr has been held at Guantánamo since 2002, when he was 15. Accused of the murder of an American soldier in Afghanistan, Khadr is the only citizen of a Western country still in confinement at Camp Delta, where he has now spent a third of his young life. Prior to that, he and his brothers were pushed into al Qaeda training camps by their father, who was killed in battle in Afghanistan in 2003. The eldest brother is currently in prison in Toronto, Canada, awaiting judgement on a US extradtion request for allegedly supplying weapons to al Qaeda; the second eldest was an unsuccessful al Qaeda recruit turned FBI and CIA informant during his time in prison in Kaboul and at Guantánamo. He claims that once his cover was blown, the Americans sent him back to Kaboul with neither money nor passport and was only able to be repatriated to Canada with the help of the Canadian embassy in Bosnia. Meanwhile, Khadr's younger brother was injured in the attack that killed their father and is now a paraplegic who spent many months in a hospital in Pakistan before finally regaining Canada and his mother and sisters.Given this family background, it is not entirely surprising that pleas to Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper to repatriate Khadr have been refused on the grounds that Khadr is "accused of very serious crimes" for which he must be judged. But being judged does not include, among other things, being beaten and threatened with rape, as Khadr claims to have been during his captivity at Bagram Air Force Base and Guantánamo. Despite the Canadian Supreme Court's ruling that Khadr's detention and interrogation at Guantánamo violated Canada's international human rights obligations, as well as U.S. domestic law and Khadr's lawyer's attempts to convince the military judge that the U.S. is violating both American and international laws with respect to protecting children and former child soldiers, Khadr continues to be held and his trial date repeatedly pushed back. Now set for January 26, 2009, his only hope of escaping trial by military commission - according to procedures that violate both U.S. and international law - lies in President-elect Obama's pledge to close Guantánamo.
