The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr

To see their client Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay, Muneer Ahmad and Rick Wilson have to take a chartered single-prop plane from Miami to the base. It takes four hours to circumnavigate Cuban airspace. The bay itself is uncommonly beautiful. It is horseshoe-shaped, with the camps on one side and military and civilian housing on the other. Nothing ever moves quickly; multiday waits, for unexplained security reasons, are standard. Ahmad and Wilson sometimes have to wait a week to see Omar for a few hours. To protect the Cuban iguana, in accordance with the Endangered Species Act, the speed limit on the base is set at twenty-five miles an hour -- a good metaphor, Ahmad says, for the studied stalling techniques of the base's administrators. The camps are on a level piece of ground close to the sea. They come into view when the visitors' bus rounds the final curve. From that distance, in the beauty of the setting, the prison complex appears to be a resort.

Ahmad and Wilson are professors of law at American University, where they run the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Ahmad is slender and pensive; Wilson is a sizable guy whose default attitude is geniality. They began representing Omar Khadr after the U.S. Supreme Court granted due-process rights to Guantanamo prisoners in 2004. They took the case on legal principle but also, as Ahmad says, "to remind the world that this kid is there, that he is alive, that his life has value and meaning and that he's been thrown in a hole. It's our collective responsibility to treat him with the dignity that he deserves."

When Ahmad saw Omar for the first time, in October 2004 -- after the convoluted flight and the numberless delays and checkpoints and searches and phalanxes of armed soldiers, and after being told so many times how evil the detainees were -- his first thought was "He's just a little kid." Omar was gaunt and pale, in a state of everlasting exhaustion, his senses starved by solitude. He had large gunshot-wound scars on his back and chest, and smaller scars over most of his body, several parts of which still held shrapnel.

"You feel a general protectiveness toward these folks just because they're kept without access to anyone," Ahmad says. "And because of Omar's age and lack of world experience, you feel that much more protective. You're conscious of not infantilizing him, but when someone is that young, you would be wrong not to recognize this. Our contention is that children are deserving of special protection -- that's been our legal approach, and it's also been our ethos in our relationship with him."

It took Omar a while to accept that his lawyers were not part of the interrogation system at Guantanamo. Their initial visits, Wilson says, were spent trying to get him to believe in them -- legal strategy was secondary. Gradually, Omar revealed himself to be very shy and curious and, in most ways, still a child, with a child's sweetness and credulous charm. Despite the rate at which his bones were lengthening, isolation and trauma seemed to have preserved him in emotional time. When he learned a new word -- his experiences had left odd gaps in his knowledge -- he tried to use it right away, and as often as possible. When Wilson and Ahmad offered to get him something to read, he asked for coloring books and car magazines and books with photographs of big animals. When they asked him what kind of juice he wanted them to bring back after a break during one meeting, he said, "Just something weird."

Whenever Wilson or Ahmad left a pen on the interview table, Omar would pick it up and start taking it apart and putting it back together again. He always asked to play with Ahmad's digital watch, which had a stopwatch function; he never tired of using it to test his reflexes. He wanted to know all about his lawyers: their ages, their hometowns, their family backgrounds, why they had chosen to become lawyers. The few short letters he was able to write are the work of a child:

To my dear family:- i miss you very much and i hope i can see you in the nearast time . . . don't forgat me from you pray'urs and don't forget to writ me and if ther any problem writ me. your [heart] son:- omar [heart] khadr

When he discussed the government's case against him, Omar did not mention ideology or God. He was still devout, but he did not always manage to pray five times a day. He seemed to have drifted from the absolutism of his family.

Omar grasped legal concepts surprisingly quick. When Wilson and Ahmad half-seriously told him he should study law, he showed something close to delight. Then he laughed darkly: He was unable to contemplate a future so far removed from Guantanamo, a future in which an "enemy combatant" was acquitted and became a lawyer. On the advice of Wilson and Ahmad, he wrote a note to the presiding officer at his first military hearing in April, refusing to participate in the proceedings until he was removed from solitary confinement: "With my respect to you, i'm boycotting thes persedures untel i be treated humainly and fair." ,p>