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In July 2002, a Special Forces unit in southeast Afghanistan received intelligence that a group of Al Qaeda fighters was operating out of a mud-brick compound in Ab Khail, a small hill town near the Pakistani border. The Taliban regime had fallen seven months earlier, but the rough border regions had not yet been secured. When the soldiers arrived at the compound, they looked through a crack in the door and saw five men armed with assault rifles sitting inside. The soldiers called for the men to surrender. The men refused. The soldiers sent Pashto translators into the compound to negotiate. The men promptly slaughtered the translators. The American soldiers called in air support and laid siege to the compound, bombing and strafing it until it was flat and silent. They walked into the ruins. They had not gotten far when a wounded fighter, concealed behind a broken wall, threw a grenade, killing Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer. The soldiers immediately shot the fighter three times in the chest, and he collapsed.
When the soldiers got close, they saw that he was just a boy. Fifteen years old and slightly built, he could have passed for thirteen. He was bleeding heavily from his wounds, but he was -- unbelievably -- alive. The soldiers stood over him.
"Kill me," he murmured, in fluent English. "Please, just kill me."
His name was Omar Khadr. Born into a fundamentalist Muslim family in Toronto, he had been prepared for jihad since he was a small boy. His parents, who were Egyptian and Palestinian, had raised him to believe that religious martyrdom was the highest achievement he could aspire to. In the Khadr family, suicide bombers were spoken of with great respect. According to U.S intelligence, Omar's father used charities as front groups to raise and launder money for Al Qaeda. Omar's formal military training -- bombmaking, assault-rifle marksmanship, combat tactics -- before he turned twelve. For nearly a year before the Ab Khail siege, according to the U.S. government, Omar and his father and brothers had fought with the Taliban against American and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. Before that, they had been living in Jalalabad, with Osama bin Laden. Omar spent much of his adolescence in Al Qaeda compounds.
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.
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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.
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. The problem with treating teenage prisoners as adults, whatever their crimes, is that teenagers are especially Just before he got on the plane, Omar was forced into sensory-deprivation gear that the military uses to disorient prisoners prior to interrogation. The guards pulled black thermal mittens onto Omar's hands and taped them hard at the wrists. They pulled opaque goggles over his eyes and placed soundproof earphones over his ears. They put a deodorizing mask over his mouth and nose. They bolted him, fully trussed, to a backless bench. Whichever limbs hadn't already lost sensation from the cuffs lost sensation from the high-altitude cold during the flight, which took fifteen hours. "There was points I wished to God that one of these MPs would go crazy and then shoot me," recalled one of the hundreds of detainees who have made the trip. "It was the only time in my life that I really wished for a bullet." At Guantanamo, Omar was led, his senses still blocked, onto a bus that took the prisoners to a ferry dock. Some of the buses didn't have seats, and the prisoners usually sat cross-legged on the floor. Guards often lifted the prisoners' earphones, told them not to move, and when they moved -- helplessly, with the motion of the bus, like bowling pins -- started kicking them. The repeated blows often left detainees unable to walk for weeks. After the ferry ride, Omar was evaluated at a base hospital. "Welcome to Israel," someone told him. Then he was locked in a steel cage eight feet long and six feet wide. Because the cage had a sink and squat-toilet and the bed was welded to the floor, the open floor space was comparable to that of a small walk-in closet. The cages had been hurriedly constructed from steel mesh and transoceanic shipping containers. Giant banana rats ran freely through the cells and across the roofs and shit everywhere: on beds, on sinks, on Korans. Prisoners were allowed only one five-minute shower each week; the cellblocks stood in a perpetual stench. Omar's arrival at Guantanamo in October 2002 coincided with a fundamental turn in the administration's War on Terror. Within weeks of his arrival, at the authorization of President Bush, interrogators at the detention facility began using starkly inhumane techniques. Before Omar Khadr had even started to assimilate the wondrous horrors of Guantanamo Bay, his captors began to torture him.
Advertisement Omar and his brothers attended madrassahs and Islamic schools.
His mother and two older sisters covered their bodies and
completely veiled their faces. At home, the Khadr children were
warned that the purity of Islam was being compromised, from within
and without. The quest to repurify it diminished to insignificance
everything else in life. Purity was the simple measure by which
good and evil were distinguished, and the means of destroying evil
were equally simple. The Khadr children were raised to serve a
purpose. Their fealty was sounded every day. 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. In 1992, not long after Omar had begun his studies at a
madrassah in Peshawar, Ahmed nearly died after stepping on a land
mine in Logar Province, Afghanistan. (Intelligence sources say he
had gone there to fight with predecessors of the Taliban in the
Afghan civil war.) Ahmed was evacuated to a hospital in Toronto,
and the rest of the family returned to Canada with him. It would
take him two years to recover. Of the Khadr children, Omar was the closest to his father. He
was seven when Ahmed got hurt. It was hard to keep him away from
his father's bedside. In Toronto, he proved to be one of those
unusual children who take it upon themselves to care for their
families -- he seemed to want to hold his father's place until
Ahmed recovered. "He was always there for us," his sister Zaynab
recalled later. When someone wasn't feeling well, Omar would always
bring them the comfort food they liked best. He was hypersensitive
to tension in the family and instinctively dispelled it: He often
did an impersonation of Captain Haddock, the spluttering character
from the Belgian comic-book series Tintin, which Omar
loved: "Buh-buh-billions of bl-bl-blistering bl-bl-blue barnacles!"
he would say, or "Ten thousand thuh-thuh-thundering typhoons!" It
always broke everybody up. Donations collected at the Khadrs' mosque paid the rent while
Ahmed was in the hospital. The Isna Islamic School waived tuition
for the Khadr children. At school, Omar did well in everything. He
began memorizing the Koran, in Arabic, at age seven. He seemed to
know that his successes could counterbalance the underachievements
of his brothers. On Abdurahman's report card, his Islamic-studies
teacher wrote, "May Allah help him." Omar's teachers made it clear
that they were grateful to have him in their classes. "He was very
smart, very eager and very polite," one recalled. As soon as Ahmed was well enough to walk with a four-pointed
cane, 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 had not reached the age of reason; his nine-year-old
imagination could not yet accommodate the world's layers. But he
had been trained, with special care, to divide the universe into
the province of righteous work and the forces arrayed against it.
Twice now he had watched his father nearly die in the service of
righteousness. The forces Omar Khadr had been warned against must
have seemed, from beneath his father's second hospital bed, very
real: omnipresent and irrational, destroying the sacred for its
very sanctity. If Omar's kind disposition seemed to dissent from
the hardness of his family's beliefs, then witnessing his father's
suffering ended it. Ahmed's identity subsumed Omar's own; the son
accepted the price and necessity of the father's cause. Omar did
not lose his uncommon altruistic compassion, but he acquired,
unavoidably, a fixed fervency he seemed ready to act on. The
Toronto imam who had known him when he was seven said Omar's
experience in Pakistan left him "radicalized." After four months in prison, Ahmed Said Khadr was released at
the request of the Canadian government. He moved his family to
Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to live with Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden and
his many wives and children occupied a large dirt-wattle compound
surrounded by military training camps. The Khadr family denies
being part of Al Qaeda, but the U.S. government says that Omar was
soon sent to join his older brothers, Abdullah and Abdurahman, at a
military camp outside the town of Khalden. The camp provided
instructional units on handguns, sniper tactics and marksmanship,
assault rifles, bombmaking and combat tactics. Advertisement In 1998, when Al Qaeda members suicide-bombed the American
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 220 people and wounding
4,000, everyone in the Jalalabad compound celebrated. A lot of free
juice was handed out. People joked that they should carry out more
operations -- they'd get free juice all the time. The celebration
ended when the Americans retaliated with cruise missiles,
destroying buildings and killing and wounding a dozen people. For
Omar, the attack reinforced, as nothing else had, his belief that
the enemy was real. Omar was fourteen on September 11th. The
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon created an
uproar of rejoicing in the camps, but everyone knew that serious
American reprisals were imminent, and the compounds were abandoned.
Abdurahman, who had become deeply disillusioned with Al Qaeda's
killing of civilians, defected to Kabul, where he was taken
prisoner by the Northern Alliance and handed over to the CIA.
According to the U.S. government, Omar followed his father into the
mountains, where they soon began fighting for Al Qaeda. Whatever his indoctrination at that moment, Omar would still
have been recognizable to the people who had known him as a boy in
Toronto. "Omar is our mother and our father, our sister and our
brother," Ahmed wrote in a letter to Zaynab. "He does everything
for us. He cooks our meals and does our laundry. Sometimes, I ask
your mother: Are you sure he's ours? He's too good to be ours." A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at
Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. "Get
up," the guard said. "You have a reservation." "Reservation" is the
commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation. In the interrogation room, Omar's interviewer grew displeased
with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained
Omar tightly to an eye bolt in the center of the floor. Omar's
hands and feet were shackled together; the eye bolt held him at the
point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left
alone for half an hour. Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar's arms, pulled them
behind his back and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly
at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again
bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body
experiences in this particular "stress position" can quickly lead
to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that
happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed
his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body
into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit
of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward
against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete
floor. The guards left. An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his
chains and pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds,
Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had
passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on
himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while
and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without
altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through
the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so
tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and
around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was
to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they'd successfully
pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him
and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of
clothes for two days. The design of Omar Khadr's life at Guantanamo Bay apparently
began as a theory in the minds of Air Force researchers. After the
Korean War, the Air Force created a program called SERE --
Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape -- to help captured pilots
resist interrogation. SERE's founders wanted to know what kind of
torture was most destructive to the human psyche so that they could
train pilots to withstand it. In experiments, they held subjects in
dummy POW camps and had them starved, stripped naked and partially
drowned. Administrators carefully noted the subjects' reactions,
often measuring the levels of stress hormones in their blood. The most effective form of torture turned out to have two
components. The first is pain and harm delivered in unpredictable,
sometimes illusory environments -- an absolute denial of physical
comfort and spatial-temporal orientation. The second is a removal
of the inner comfort of identity -- achieved by artfully
humiliating people and coercing them to commit offenses against
their own religion, dignity and morality, until they become
unrecognizable to and ashamed of themselves. SERE scientists came up with a variety of stress-torture
techniques: sleep deprivation, sexual mortification, religious
desecration, hooding, waterboarding. In SERE theory, the techniques
are be used in concert and continuously -- coercive interrogation
should become a life experience. This is Guantanamo Bay: To be held
there is, per se, to be tortured. Behavioral scientists reportedly
manage every aspect of detainees' lives. In one case, a
psychologist told guards to limit a detainee to seven squares of
toilet paper a day. While he was at Guantanamo, Omar was beaten in the head, nearly
suffocated, threatened with having his clothes taken indefinitely
and, as at Bagram, lunged at by attack dogs while wearing a bag
over his head. "Your life is in my hands," an intelligence officer
told him during an interrogation in the spring of 2003. During the
questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. He
spat in Omar's face, tore out some of his hair and threatened to
send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria -- places where they
tortured people without constraints: very slowly, analytically
removing body parts. The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar,
would hand him to Askri raqm tisa -- Soldier Number Nine.
Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who
specialized in raping prisoners. Omar's chair was removed. Because his hands and ankles were
shackled, he fell to the floor. His interrogator told him to get
up. Standing up was hard, because he could not use his hands. When
he did, his interrogator told him to sit down again. When he sat,
the interrogator told him to stand again. He refused. The
interrogator called two guards into the room, who grabbed Omar by
the neck and arms, lifted him into the air and dropped him onto the
floor. The interrogator told them to do it again -- and again and
again and again. Then he said he was locking Omar's case file in a
safe: Omar would spend the rest of his life in a cell at Guantanamo
Bay. Several weeks later, a man who claimed to be Afghan interrogated
Omar. He wore an American flag on his uniform pants. He said his
name was Izmarai -- "lion" -- and he spoke in Farsi and
occasionally in Pashto and English. Izmarai said a new prison was
under construction in Afghanistan for uncooperative Guantanamo
detainees. "In Afghanistan," Izmarai said, "they like small boys."
He pulled out a photograph of Omar and wrote on it, in Pashto,
"This detainee must be transferred to Bagram." Omar was taken from his chair and short-shackled to an eye bolt
in the floor, his hands behind his knees. He was left that way for
six hours. On March 31st, 2003, Omar's security level was
downgraded to "Level Four, with isolation." Everything in his cell
was taken, and he spent a month without human contact in a
windowless box kept at the approximate temperature of a
refrigerator. When he was not being tortured or held in isolation, Omar spent
virtually every waking minute of his captivity at Guantanamo alone
in his cell, first in a facility called Camp Delta and then in one
called Camp V. His left eye, the one injured at Ab Khail, had gone
blind and was immobile. Except for a Koran, there was nothing in
Omar's cells to occupy his mind. During his first year and a half
at Guantanamo, he was permitted to exercise only twice a week for
fifteen minutes, in a cage slightly larger than his own.
Conversation between cells was possible, but prisoners had become
so unstable and fearful of one another that they tended not to say
much; there were no friendships. Omar tried to talk to his guards,
about anything, but they were unresponsive. They often covered
their nameplates with tape before entering detention
facilities. As Guantanamo was imposing heavy stagnation on Omar, it was also
instilling in him an abiding sense of vulnerability and
disequilibrium. The call to prayer was usually played five times a
day, but sometimes it changed, or stopped. Exercise could come at
any time of the day or night. If the guards woke you at 3:30 a.m.
and you didn't present yourself quickly enough to please them, you
didn't get to exercise. The timing and character of interrogations
followed no pattern. Sometimes prisoners were woken up and moved
from cell to cell for half the night for no apparent reason. This
tactic was so common it became known among guards as "the
frequent-flier program." Advertisement "How are you? How are you?" Abdurahman yelled in Arabic. According to Abdurahman, Omar told him to stick to the story the
family had agreed upon -- the Khadrs did charity work and knew
nothing of Al Qaeda. "But how is your health?" Abdurahman yelled. "It's OK," Omar yelled back. "I'm just losing my left eye and
all. They don't want to operate on it." It was the only time they encountered one another. Guards and
interrogators continually reminded Omar that no one in the world
knew where he was. No one would know if they decided to kill him.
He heard gunshots. He heard the sounds other prisoners made when
they were dragged back from interrogation rooms. Around the time of
Omar's arrival, detainees watched as guards rushed into the cell of
a prisoner named Jumah Al-Dousari and began kicking him in the
stomach and bashing his head against the floor. "When they took him
out," one detainee later reported, "they hosed the cell down and
the water ran red with blood." It was the kind of beating Omar
witnessed repeatedly. In July 2004, when Omar was seventeen, he was moved to Camp V.
In his new cell the fluorescent ceiling lights stayed on
twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he went for weeks without seeing
daylight. His cell was kept cold; Omar spent a lot of his time
trying to stay warm: balling himself up, covering his extremities
to the extent it was possible, making the best use of his blanket
and mattress pad when they hadn't been confiscated. His metal cot
was a problem: It briskly gave away his body heat. After a day in his Camp V cell, Omar had nothing more to see,
touch, taste, hear or smell. He was accompanied only by his own
disordered thoughts. He tried to sleep the time away, but the cold
was inimical to sleep, and the incessant lighting had divested him
of his feel for night and day. Over the course of any given month,
Omar did not know whether he would get to see the sun, have a
conversation with another human being or be allowed to wear
clothes. For the past four years, Guantanamo has held him
dead-still in the vacuum of his cell without ever allowing him to
come to rest. The institution has made it clear to him that this
will remain, for untold years, the form of his life. Advertisement Soon after Omar arrived at Guantanamo, he began exhibiting the
kinds of disassociative symptoms most adolescent psychiatrists
would have expected. He was startled to the point of disorientation
by small changes in his surroundings. He had fainting spells. He
cried frequently. When he heard gunshots at Camp Delta, he had a
vision of helicopter gunships descending on him, and these kinds of
enclosing flashbacks came repeatedly, as did nightmares about the
Ab Khail firefight, in which he felt, with phenomenal
verisimilitude, bullets piercing his chest. His appetite
diminished; he took on the appearance of the permanently
malnourished. He entered what clinicians call a state of
hypervigilance: He started thinking he might be attacked at any
time -- without reason, his heart rate would jump, and he would
sweat and hyperventilate. He began hearing sounds -- screams,
bombs, things he could not identify -- when the cellblock was
silent. Every week or so, a self-generated rage possessed him -- an
experience wholly foreign to his character. For long periods he
felt no emotion at all. He started blaming himself for the things
that had happened to him; he became deeply ashamed of what he had
suffered. He developed a pronounced twitch on the left side of his
face, of which he remained unaware. As with every other detainee at Guantanamo, Omar's future became
a vacancy upon arrival, and his imagination quickly lost the
ability to fill it. There were no conditions for release: The Bush
administration had suspended all rules of judicial review and due
process. The human mind has tools for dealing with extreme physical
and emotional stress, but it is not equipped to manage purgatorial
limbo. In every POW camp in history there has been an easily
imagined endpoint: the end of the war. In the Soviet gulag, there
were charges and trials and sentences, however fraudulent. The
machinery was visible. If you weren't worked to death, you got out.
At Guantanamo, what detainee after detainee has said -- what study
after study has shown -- is that insanity and suicidal impulses
inevitably accompany the kind of futurelessness Gitmo imposes on
its inmates. In June, three detainees hung themselves in their
cells, and more than forty others have attempted suicide since
2003. The quantity of such self-destruction, in circumstances so
carefully designed to prevent it, indicates a suffusing despair
unimaginable outside the gates of the base. Even if all the
detainees were released today and received immediate psychological
treatment, a great majority would be psychologically impaired for
the rest of their lives. Omar thought earnestly about killing himself. In January 2003,
four months after he arrived, his guards were sufficiently worried
about his suicidal disposition to confiscate his possessions.
Psychosis was all around him. During the fall of 2004, Omar watched
an Arab orthopedist named Ayman go insane. Over a period of months,
Dr. Ayman became entirely mute, except for an occasional scream and
a single question, asked of no one in particular: "Who is a woman
here?" Several medical experts have reviewed the results of two
mental-status exams administered to Omar. All concurred in their
interpretations. Dr. Eric Trupin, who has written extensively on
the effects of incarceration on adolescents, concluded that Omar
has been traumatized and tortured to a degree that is, in Trupin's
considerable experience, remarkable. "The impact of these harsh interrogation techniques on an
adolescent such as O.K., who also has been isolated for almost
three years, is potentially catastrophic to his future
development," Trupin stated in his report. "Long-term consequences
of harsh interrogation techniques are both more pronounced for
adolescents and more difficult to remediate or treat even after
such interrogations are discontinued, particularly if the victim is
uncertain as to whether they will resume. It is my opinion, to a
reasonable scientific certainty, that O.K.'s continued subjection
to the threat of physical and mental abuse places him at
significant risk for future psychiatric deterioration, which may
include irreversible psychiatric symptoms and disorders, such as a
psychosis with treatment-resistant hallucinations, paranoid
delusions and persistent self-harming attempts." Advertisement 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> Advertisement It took several more meetings for the facts to emerge. Although
the U.S. government denies mistreating Omar, neither Wilson nor
Ahmad ever doubted the truth of what he told them. They had read
hundreds of pages of detainee accounts of torture that
independently corroborated one another. A Swedish detainee
described being held for a dozen hours at extremely cold
temperatures and senselessly moved from cell to cell throughout the
night. An Australian detainee described the use of frigid and
stifling temperatures, short shackles and random beatings. A
Pentagon inquiry confirmed detainee accounts of torture by sexual
humiliation. A former Guantanamo interrogator described detainees
being "shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed
to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food
commercial." In an internal memo, an FBI agent described finding a
detainee unconscious on the floor of a room "well over a hundred
degrees . . . with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently
been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." The
U.S. Army's own interrogation logs documented the treatment of a
Saudi detainee who was interrogated in eighteen-hour sessions for
forty-eight days, put on a leash and forced to bark like a dog,
given intravenous fluids and locked in a room with no toilet,
stripped and straddled and sexually derided by female guards, and
subjected to a staged kidnapping that involved being tranquilized,
blindfolded and flown to a fake destination. There is no scientific evidence that such coercion is better
than any other kind of interrogation; it is probably worse. SERE
techniques were not designed to be used in the real world; they
were designed to test the psychic endurance of Air Force pilots.
When the FBI sent some of its best counterterrorism agents to
Guantanamo soon after the camps opened, the agents chose to use
what is known as rapport-based interrogation, which apparently
worked. The FBI agents found the coercive tactics used by military
intelligence both disgusting and stupid: The abusive treatment
instantly destabilized detainees, making the information they
provided unreliable as intelligence and useless in court. By the time Omar's lawyers took his case, it was clear that the
torture methods used at Guantanamo had been directly authorized by
President Bush. In January 2002, the president's lawyer, Alberto
Gonzales, working for the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel, advised the president that nearly all forms of torture
were legal. Physical abuse was not torture unless it generated the
intensity of pain associated with "organ failure, impairment of
bodily function or even death." Psychological methods were illegal
only if they inflicted harm that endured for "months, or even
years." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a new
interrogation paradigm, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller instituted the
same SERE techniques at Guantanamo that he would later bring to Abu
Ghraib. Rick Wilson and Muneer Ahmad have a lot of experience
representing prisoners, mostly immigrant detainees and death-row
inmates. "Nothing we've seen comes close to the experience of
Guantanamo," says Ahmad. "Not just the treatment of detainees but
the brute force of state power." During the course of their research, the attorneys were struck
by the overwhelming evidence that most of the detainees at
Guantanamo are innocent. The CIA had pulled Abdurahman Khadr out of
the camps not just because the detainees around him had become
mentally unstable and uncommunicative, but because so few of them
knew anything about Al Qaeda or the Taliban. During his debriefing,
one of the first things Abdurahman told his CIA handlers was how
utterly the United States had failed, in its military sweeps after
the fall of the Taliban, to distinguish between the guilty and the
innocent. In Afghanistan, the U.S. offered cash rewards for
suspected Al Qaeda members that were sometimes equivalent to
several years of local wages. The American military thus made every
Arab-looking person in Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunists.
Warlords rounded up people and brought them en masse to American
authorities. Others were turned in to settle grudges, or because
they had once associated with someone from Al Qaeda. U.S.
intelligence apparently took criminals and mercenaries and
underpaid soldiers at their word. Advertisement One military-intelligence officer, speaking anonymously, told a
reporter that more than seventy-five percent of the detainees at
Guantanamo are innocent. When the government recently prepared
Summaries of Evidence for its 517 detainees in an attempt to
justify its "enemy combatant" designation, only eight percent were
"definitively identified" as Al Qaeda fighters. Sixty-six percent
have no definitive connection to Al Qaeda at all. The detention
camps of Guantanamo Bay are filled with shepherds, taxi drivers,
farmers, small businessmen, drug addicts, homeless people and
children. For Rick Wilson and Muneer Ahmad, this nasty truth led to an
unnerving conclusion: After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush
administration effectively kidnapped hundreds of innocent people
because they looked like Arabs and shipped them to a detention
facility designed to torture them nonstop and in perpetuity. If the
president were tried in the Hague, the prosecution would have an
easy case. Before the Supreme Court extended the
protection of the Geneva Convention to Guantanamo detainees, the
government charged Omar Khadr with murder, attempted murder,
conspiracy and aiding the enemy. The allegations were odd: Khadr
was a soldier fighting in support of a national army. The Geneva
Convention sensibly prohibits any government from charging enemy
soldiers with murder for acting like soldiers. It is hard to say
how the government will now reformulate its charges; it is hard to
say how long Congress and the administration will spend designing
tribunals that satisfy the Supreme Court. For the moment, however,
Omar Khadr remains an enemy combatant and, therefore, subject to
unlimited solitary confinement. Ahmad and Wilson have filed motions in federal court seeking to
enjoin the continuing torture and inhumane confinement of their
client. Thus far, none has been granted. Except for a brief hiatus,
Omar Khadr has been alone in a cell at Guantanamo Bay for close to
four years. Four years is nearly a quarter of his life. Since he
was caught, he has grown eight inches. It is nearly impossible for
him to believe that he will ever be released, and his daily life
remains filled with menace: He is so conditioned to abuse in
captivity that he is incapable of believing he will ever be free of
it. A year and a half ago, Dr. Eric Trupin predicted that Omar Khadr
would suffer serious permanent damage unless he was immediately
moved into a humane detention facility, convinced that he was safe
from all injury and provided with acute psychological care. Such a
course of treatment, if ever administered, will come several years
too late. It is possible that Omar's mental life will progressively
fracture into suicide attempts, hallucinations and paranoia. Having
lived out the final years of his adolescence in Guantanamo Bay, he
has learned nothing about the conventions of adult life, but he has
as deep an understanding of powerlessness as any person can. In the summer of 2005, Omar joined 200 other detainees in a
hunger strike. They were protesting their unlimited detention
without due process. Within a few weeks, guards began to beat them
and force-feed them through the nose with thick tubes. From the
diary of Omar Deghayes, a detainee who participated in the strike:
Omar Khadr is very sick in our block. He is throwing [up]
blood. They gave him cyrum [serum] when they found him on the floor
in his cell. Omar was carried to the hospital. As he was being
moved back to his cell, he collapsed. The guards beat him. The resolve of the strikers deteriorated, and the strike ended.
No concessions were made. >> This article appears in the August 24th issue of
"Rolling Stone" magazine. >> Plus: For the extraordinary story of a veteran foot
soldier who fought for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and joined
the jihad in Iraq, see our 2005 story, "
The Insurgent's Tale." Note: The author would like to express his gratitude to the
following sources, whose excellent reporting he drew on for this
article: Canada's National Post, for information on Omar
Khadr's childhood; The New Yorker, for information on the
SERE program; and PBS's Frontline, for information on the Khadr
family. >> Selected reader responses will appear in
Rolling Stone magazine: Write to us at letters@rollingstone.com.
Ahmed said Khadr, Omar's father, always said
he did not want to die in bed. He wanted to be killed. When his
children were very young, he told them, "If you love me, pray that
I will get martyred." Three times he asked Omar's older brother
Abdurahman to become a suicide bomber. It would bring honor to the
family, he said. Abdurahman declined. Later, when Ahmed sensed that
Abdurahman's faith was weakening, he told him, "If you ever betray
Islam, I will be the one to kill you."
Life in the Jalalabad compound was spare. Bin Laden forbade ice and
electricity. He wanted people to know how to live with nothing.
Abdurahman later described him as a regular guy who liked
volleyball and horse racing. "He had financial issues, issues with
his kids," Abdurahman said. "'The kids aren't listening. The kids
aren't doing this and that.'" Bin Laden's children drank Coke
whenever they could, despite his ban on American products. To get
them to memorize the Koran, bin Laden promised to buy them horses.
Meal portions were usually small enough to keep the prisoners in a
state of low-grade hunger. Several times Omar found powder or
partially dissolved tablets in the plastic glass he got with his
food. The drugs produced dizziness, sleepiness or hyperalertness.
Tasteless and invisible, they were not detectable beforehand. Omar
was never told what they were or why he had been drugged. Once,
when he was being transferred, Omar learned that his brother
Abdurahman was in an adjacent prison yard. Abdurahman, forced by
the CIA to choose between life imprisonment and cooperation, had
chosen the latter. Omar had no idea that his brother was in
Guantanamo to spy on detainees.
One of the chief mental defenses against
harsh imprisonment is durable perspective; sanity requires a steady
identity. But identity in adolescence is precarious by nature:
Teenagers change their identities and beliefs all the time, and
they cannot develop a secure perspective in the isolation of
captivity. To figure out the world, teenagers have to be in it. For
adolescents like Omar Khadr, who have already experienced radical
trauma, the characteristic symptoms of months or years of harsh
imprisonment -- paranoid delusions, suicidal tendencies,
hallucinatory psychoses -- can become irreversible.
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.
Once Omar allowed himself to believe that he
had acquired committed advocates, his life bent itself around his
meetings with them. They had brought him back into the
forward-moving world and reminded him who he was. His accounts of
mistreatment emerged slowly. At the end of his first meeting with
his lawyers, he mentioned, embarrassed, that he had been threatened
with rape. He was convinced that Ahmad and Wilson would never
return, and it suddenly occurred to him, during the interview's
final moments, that this might be his last chance to speak to the
world. It was easier to reveal something shameful to confessors he
would never see again.
In his debriefing, Abdurahman Khadr told the CIA that only ten
percent of the detainees at Guantanamo "are really dangerous." The
rest, he said, "are people that don't have anything to do with it,
don't even . . . understand what they're doing here." One innocent
man, Abdurahman said, was given up by his own son for $5,000.
Another detainee was nothing more than a drug user: Every time the
MPs came around, he begged them for hashish: "He doesn't even know
what he's doing here," Abdurahman said. "Truly a drug addict, not
Al Qaeda at all."