Jan 16th, 2009
Posted by Jennifer Turner, Human Rights Program at 3:37pm	Human Rights, National Security

International Intervention Needed on Behalf of Obama's Child Soldiers

President-elect Barack Obama will make history on his inauguration day. And if a scheduled Guantánamo military commission trial goes forward on January 26, President-elect Obama will make a wholly different kind of history, by presiding over a terrible historical event.

On January 26, Guantánamo detainee Omar Khadr, a 22-year-old Canadian national who has been held at Guantánamo for nearly one-third of his life, is slated to be tried by military commission for war crimes allegedly committed when he was 15. If Omar Khadr's trial goes forward as scheduled on January 26, one of the first acts of President-elect Obama's administration will be to preside over the first war crimes prosecution of a child soldier in U.S. history.

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If President-elect Obama does not suspend the military commission trial of Omar Khadr, the United States will become the first western nation since Nuremberg to hold a war crimes trial for crimes allegedly committed by a child. Omar Khadr's trial would require President-elect Obama to break from international practice and flout international standards that recognize children used as child soldiers should be treated first as victims in need of rehabilitation, not abused and prosecuted by an unjust and discredited military commission.

Today, the ACLU called on two international U.N. bodies to intervene in the military commission cases of Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, who were both teenagers when they were captured by U.S. forces. (Like Omar Khadr, Mohammed Jawad faces trial by military commission, though a trial date has not yet been set in his case.) We called on the U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict and the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child to issue public statements calling for their military commission cases to be suspended. Earlier this week, the ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers jointly called on President-elect Obama to suspend Omar Khadr's trial — a call that was echoed by children's rights scholars, advocates, and professionals who work with youth.

While intervention by U.N. bodies in Omar Khadr's case is an exceptional measure, it is warranted by the urgent circumstances. If Omar Khadr's trial goes forward, it would establish dangerous precedent for the United States and the entire world. Time is running out for President-elect Obama to honor his promise to break from the Bush administration by respecting U.S. human rights treaty obligations. Guantánamo, its military commissions, and unjust trials of child soldiers have no place in the new direction the U.S. government plans to take under his leadership. Join us in asking President-elect Obama to stop this travesty in its tracks. Send him a message through the change.gov website at www.aclu.org/askobama.

Permalink |	Human Rights, National Security

Tags: children's rights, Close Guantanamo, Human Rights Program

1. Vic Livingston Says:
   Jan 19th, 2009 at 2:00pm

   PLEA TO OBAMA: Ban the EXTRAJUDICIAL POLICIES

   By VIC LIVINGSTON, columnist, NowPublic.com/scrivener; former business reporter, Fox TV Phila., NY Daily News, Phila. Bulletin, St. Petersburg Times

   • Extrajudicial targeting and punishment allows a calculated bypass of the judicial system -- paving the way for myriad abuses.

   (NOTE: This commentary was written for posting to The Washington Post political blog, "The Fix." The post did not go through. Instead, the author received a full-screen message that the post was "being held for the blog owner." As has been written in this space, it's believed this message did not emanate from The Washington Post, but was a "spoofed page" inserted in a "targeted" data stream by government censors who actively infringe upon the author's constitutional rights.

   The question now: Will these draconian, unconstitutional infringements on personal liberty continue into the Obama administration -- or is this latest example of apparent prior restraint and censorship of political speech just a last gasp of an eight-year authoritarian reign of terror? That question is relevant to the discussion below:)

   Within days or even hours of his swearing in, President Barack Obama is expected to sign an executive order prohibiting any agent of government from committing acts of torture -- an order that would incontrovertibly reject as illegal, inhumane, and a violation of international law and treaties the catalogue of "enhanced interrogation techniques" practiced by officially-sanctioned operatives of the Bush-Cheney administration.

   But "torture" is a term of (dark) art. As recent history attests, one chief executive's (or VP's) "aggressive" interrogation technique is another's beastial inquisition. To borrow a descriptive adjective from the Bush-Cheney lexicon, techniques that reasonable humanists might regard as torture (i.e., waterboarding) are but "tools" in a toolbox-full of methodologies and tactics that continue to be employed by federal and local authorities...

   ...whether the stated goal is victory in the "war on terror" -- or, just perhaps, control and submission of the "targets" of a particular "operation" (or "op," to use the common argot).

   If torture is just a tool, then what's really needed is a prohibition on the underlying anti-democratic, inhumane policies -- the purposeful bypass of the judicial system in favor of what has been termed extrajudicial targeting and punishment.

   THAT, not just the tactical tool of torture, is the venal sin of the Bush administration -- the methodical and calculated establishment of policies and organizational structures that have substituted an indiscriminate, undemocratic and unjust authoritarianism for the rule of law.

   Example: A nationwide, government-funded covert vigilante network, comprised of citizen "community watch" and anti-terrorism volunteers and off-duty or retired public safety, military and intelligence officers, who systematically stalk and inflict physical punishment on American citizens who have been unjustly "targeted" by authorities as "dissidents," "troublemakers," "whistle-blowers" or "undesirables."

   http://www.nowpublic.com/world/gestapo-usa-govt -funded-vigilante-network-targets-terrorizes-u-s-citizens

   These operatives are said to employ high-tech devices such as the latest generation of silent, radiation-emitting "directed energy weapons" to degrade the physical health of their targets -- what victims of so-called organized community "gang stalking" deem as an officially-sanctioned slow genocide.

   http://www.nowpublic.com/world/domestic-torture-radia tion-weaponry-americas-horrific-shame

   The extrajudicial punishment is supplanted by a host of government programs and policies, sold to Congress as "tools" against terrorists and drug traffickers, that are being abused as a means to destroy the financial well-being of extrajudicially targeted Americans -- denying them due process under the law while inflicting upon them a cruel social genocide.

   So our appeal to President-elect Obama: Yes, issue an executive order banning "torture." But by the same stroke of the pen, ban the unconstitutional contagion of government-sponsored EXTRAJUDICIAL TARGETING AND PUNISHMENT -- the policies that have eviscerated the U.S. Constitution as well as the nation's economy.

   FOR MORE ON THREATS TO OUR LIBERTY AND SECURITY:

   http://My.NowPublic.com/scrivener

2. TONY Says:
   Jan 21st, 2009 at 8:45pm

   CHILD SOLDIERS, LETS SEE...HOW OLD DO YOU HAVE TO BE TO PLANT A BOMB OR SHOOT AN AK-47

3. BD Says:
   Jan 22nd, 2009 at 4:09pm

   If the kid did commit the crime, why not try him? A child of 15 who is making and throwing bombs and killing people is not a child - at least not in the sense of deserving of extra protection. When are the liberals going to stop being deluded into thinking these people are like soldiers and not terrorists who are on a jihad and want to kill everyone who does not believe as they do? Why is it so hard to believe there are evil people in this world? You are just so naive, and when the next big terrorist attack comes - and especially if by one of these people they let out - you will have noone but Obama to blame for reversing all that Bush had done.

4. Anonymous Says:
   Feb 12th, 2009 at 8:09pm

   BD says why do you think your filthy geasy behind is more important than a boy who is resisting your greasy ass from trampling his land, farm, hourse or livelihood. If you do not see how your filthy life is a threat to anybody all you have to do is look at your self in the mirror. you will understand, if not then get a job in a chicken abettoir and save us from your breath.

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