Crossposted at The Next Agenda For Progressive Canadian Politics
Omar Khadr may be losing it.
In a news report from Globe and Mail Omar's letter to his mother said that he had decided to put his trust in God for his defence.
He asked his mother "not to be mad" at him for doing it.
A U.S. marine appointed to represent Mr. Khadr said he was surprised by the letter's contents.
"I'm really worried for the guy, sincerely," Lieutenant-Colonel Colby Vokey said in an interview yesterday. He said the document indicates that Mr. Khadr is in a questionable mental state after being denied basic rights for so long.
"The government has done its best to thwart our efforts to a full, fair hearing," Col. Vokey said. He noted that the military has seized the young man's legal files, denied him telephone calls and recently sent him back to solitary confinement. "Why would he trust any of this when the Americans are doing all this to him?"
You may recall that Khadr was a 15 year old Canadian when he was picked up in Afghanistan in 2002. He is accused of killing an American soldier. His father,Ahmed Said Khadr, was a known associate of Osama bin Laden and reputed to be an Al Qaeda financier. According to another of his sons,
Abdurahman, the father was fully prepared to sacrifice his sons in the fight against Western interests. The family had arrived in the country after the Russian invasion.
Abdurahman was also sent to Guantanamo, but released and sent back to Afghanistan in 2003. He returned to Canada later in the year. His story is very interesting and confusing, to say the least. He claims to have entered Gitmo as a mole for the CIA. Regardless, he also expressed resentment that his father dragged them into this fight and acknowledged his role as the black sheep of his familiy, due to his lack on endorsement for Al Qaeda and its policies.
Abdullah Khadr, the eldest son, was fingered by the Taliban as the suicide bomber who killed a Canadian soldier on Feb 4, 2004. Later in February he denied this to the CBC. Complicating that case was his imprisonment in Pakistan for a year before he arrived back in Canada in December 2005. A couple of weeks after his arrival he was arrested at the behest of the Americans and held without bail.
It is also alleged that he ran Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, with his sister, Zaynab. She lives in Canada with her mother, a much younger sister and another brother who was paralyzed from the waist down, in a shoot out that killed his father. That brother is now about 17.
On Feb 8, 2006, almost 2 years to the day after the Taliban told Americans that he had died as a suicide bomber, Abdullah was indicted in Massachusetts on four charges including conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, conspiring to kill American soldiers and conspiracy to possess destructive devices to commit violence.
Americans accused Omar Khadr of killing one of their soldiers in a gun fight. According to a report in the Globe and Mail
A new report from a New York rights group says Canadian teenager Omar Khadr was carried into interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison camp on a stretcher and sometimes shackled to a door frame and left to dangle for hours.
The Centre for Constitutional Rights also says Mr. Khadr, 19, was threatened with barking dogs while wearing a bag over his head and wasn't allowed to go to the bathroom for long periods.
On one occasion, in March 2003, Mr. Khadr was allegedly dragged back and forth across the floor in a mixture of his urine and pine oil. He wasn't given a change of clothes for two days.
The recent policy change by the Americans, to treat its Guantanamo prisoners according to Geneva convention standards, was not met with much hope by Khadr's Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney who felt they were simply protecting themselves.
Edney has not been able to meet with his client.
"A principle of fundamental justice is the right to counsel of choice," said Dennis Edney, an Edmonton-based lawyer who has long represented Mr. Khadr but never been allowed to see him. "This is even more important in the context of Omar Khadr, when we consider he has no one to turn to."
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