In the sad, seemingly endless saga of Canadian Omar Khadr, the "enemy combatant" accused of terrorism and held at Guantanamo since he was 15 years old, his defense team was informed in a surprise last-minute announcement from the prosecution that there was a witness, allegedly from the U.S. government, possibly a soldier, who had "exculpatory testimony". According to a news report,
Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. trial lawyer, told reporters Thursday that the government had known about the witness but had tried to bury him. "It's an eyewitness that the government has always known about," said Kuebler.
The Canadian government won't help him. His U.S.-assigned attorney has all his legal expertise/experience in ... tax law. And the latest hearing is basically about technicalities and semantics: can he be tried as an "alien unlawful enemy combatant"? So why do they need to bury witnesses?
Reported in an article,
The last-minute disclosure of the witness is symptomatic of a larger problem of a system "designed to produce convictions," Khadr's military lawyer, naval Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, told reporters after the hearing.
Even though ACLU attorney Jamil Dakwar is in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba serving as a human rights observer at the hearing on the issue of whether Khadr is an "alien unlawful enemy combatant," subject to military tribunal, and even though he has a Canadian attorney, the deck still looks stacked against the youngest "detainee" in Guantanamo. The judge decided to withhold a decision pending a Federal Court appeal, according to reports. This is his third hearing; the first two resulted in the charges against him being thrown out.
The fact is that there was an eyewitness to the 2002 firefight that led to Khadr being charged - at the age of 15 - in the death of U.S. Army Sgt. Christopher Speer, and according to his attorney:
"It's an eyewitness that the government has always known about," said Kuebler.
"They weren't going to tell us who he was or how to get in touch with him or where he was. Their theory is that they've done their investigation and they've disclosed everything they have to disclose. And we don't necessarily have an entitlement to talk to people who were actually at the scene of the crime."
"He's been in custody for how long? Coming up on six years?" asked Deputy Chief of Defence Mike Berringer. "How we can be on the eve of a hearing to determine his status, how we can have newly discovered evidence, is beyond me."
Khadr "appeared relaxed during his hearing, telling the judge he was satisfied with his defence team...before the military judge for a pre-trial hearing as lawyers argued whether the U.S. Defence Department has the right to try him on charges of murder, attempted murder, conspiracy and spying." The judge postponed the decision.
Although Khadr told the judge he was happy with his defense team of 2 Canadian attorneys and a Pentagon-appointed one (mentioned above), the Canadian team expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the U.S. attorney has no criminal defense training or experience, which prompted the judge to ban them from this hearing.
Despite Khadr's admission that he was satisfied with his legal team, Khadr's Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney said earlier Thursday that the trial was being manipulated.
He said Khadr is only able to choose between the prospect of representing himself or accepting a U.S. military system that's stacked against him.
Edney criticized his client's U.S. lawyer, Kuebler, saying his team was unprepared.
"The military defence team has not interviewed any of the prosecution's witnesses and only recently has looked at the disclosure -- notwithstanding that the prosecution team has been preparing for these days for the last two years," Edney told CTV's Canada AM on Thursday.
Edney also said Khadr's U.S. lawyer has no trial experience and only has a background in taxation law.
"The least you could provide him (Khadr) with is a competent lawyer familiar with the areas in which Mr. Khadr is charged," he said.
Edney's partner, lawyer Nate Whitling, did manage to meet with Khadr on Wednesday to explain that Edney would not be present today.
"I think there's a concern that I would delay the process by advising the judge that first of all Mr. Khadr needs a psychiatric assessment to determine his fitness to stand trial," said Edney.
"You have to understand that Mr. Khadr has spent a quarter of his life in solitary confinement in that hellhole called Guantanamo Bay."
We hope that justice will prevail, but knowing the way the word "terrorism" stacks the deck across the board against the accused, that hope is scrawny at best.
Still it's a sign of something very, very wrong in our democracy that a child accused of murder, a child caught in the wrong place, with the wrong affiliations, at the wrong time, should be psychologically and physically tortured while still a minor, denied any sort of due process until six years later - and it's still not really "due process" - looking forward to spending a marked lifetime in no-man's-land, a future as a non-entity, held in a non-place, denied even human relationships or family - all for Cheney's vision of a more Secure World for Democracy.
thinkbridge