While America is all agog with the revelation that a 16 year old page was mistreated by Rep. Foley, and rightfully so, I think there is another story which should get some attention, about another 16 year old boy.
This boy's name is Omar Khadr. And his story, told in an article in Rolling Stone Magazine will make you hurt, that is guaranteed.
The thing to remember while reading this story is that the treatment Omar received at Guantanamo was directly ordered by George W. Bush.
Omar Khadr was born into a fundamentalist Muslim family in Toronto, Canada. He was raised to be a martyr, was taught in madrassahs and Islamic schools. His father, Ahmed, was a great supporter of Osama bin Laden and Islamic insurgency and had his own experiences of torture and imprisonment:
In 1988, when Omar was two, the Khadrs left Toronto for Peshawar, Pakistan, so Ahmed could take a job with a charity called Human Concern International. In those days, Peshawar was an operational base for Islamist insurgents fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had gone there to recruit, fund and train mujahedeen. Intelligence sources claim that many of the orphans and refugees aided by Khadr later became fundamentalist guerrillas under the guidance of bin Laden.
...
As soon as Ahmed was well enough to walk with a four-pointed cane [after stepping on a land-mine], he moved the family back to Peshawar and resumed working for Human Concern International. Not long after they arrived, when Omar was nine, terrorists led by Ayman al-Zawahiri suicide-bombed the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. According to Pakistani intelligence, much of al-Zawahiri's operational funding had passed through Human Concern International. One of the vehicles used in the attack had been purchased by a Sudanese man living with the Khadrs. The entire Khadr family was detained, their compound was raided, and Ahmed was imprisoned and tortured.
When the family was finally allowed to visit Ahmed in prison, they found a crippled old man primitively confined alongside murderers and armed robbers. Omar seemed unable to recover from this sight. Ahmed, maintaining his innocence, went on a hunger strike and was hospitalized. Omar spent every night at the hospital, curled up on the concrete floor beneath his father's bed.
Omar was devoted to his family and devoted to the Islamic cause. He spent some time in a camp run by Osama bin Laden. He became an Al Quaeda fighter.
And in July 2002, a Special Forces unit in southeast Afghanistan, captured Omar after a bloody battle. When they captured him, Omar was only 15 years old. When they captured him, Omar said:
"Kill me," he murmered in fluent English. "Please, just kill me."
They did not kill Omar. An American medic saved his life. He was sent to a hospital in Bagram:
At Ab Khail, a sergeant later said, every U.S. soldier who walked by Omar longed to put a bullet in his head. But an American medic, working near the corpse of Sgt. Speer, saved Omar's life, and he was taken to a hospital at Bagram Air Base with a bullet-split chest and serious shrapnel wounds to the head and eye. U.S. intelligence officers began interrogating him as soon as he regained consciousness. At that moment, Omar entered the extralegal archipelago of torture chambers and detention cells that the Bush administration has erected to prosecute its War on Terror. He has remained there ever since.
At Bagram, he was repeatedly brought into interrogation rooms on stretchers, in great pain. Pain medication was withheld, apparently to induce cooperation. He was ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still wet. When he could walk again, he was forced to stand for hours at a time with his hands tied above a door frame. Interrogators put a bag over his head and held him still while attack dogs leapt at his chest. Sometimes he was kept chained in an interrogation room for so long he urinated on himself.
I am not going to go into the horrific torture that Omar underwent in Guantanamo. You can read the article for that. What I do want to stress is who is responsible for the treatment of this 15 year old boy, and stress there was no reason for these methods -- and I defy anyone to explain to me what kind of information he could have had which would warrant this type of treatment, and indeed, if he had any information at all.
Just remember this one thing:
After the invasion of Afghanistan, President Bush decided, in violation of the Geneva Convention, that any adolescent apprehended by U.S. forces could be treated as an adult at age sixteen.
This is what we have come to. And this is what George W. Bush wants to continue.
Update: I hope either that this story is recommended or a front-pager does a more indepth job on it. I think it is important -- I think it provides a real "narrative" of what this Administration has done and will continue to do unless they are stopped.
Update 2: Avila's comments on this diary here include actions we can take to bear on this problem. Also, check out Avila's own work on this subject at her website (in sig line).