American Civil Liberties Union

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

Bombshell Testimony from Bagram Interrogator Convicted of Abuse, Reporters Banned from Gitmo for Reporting his Name

On Thursday, pretrial hearings continued in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, who has spent a third of his life in U.S. detention since he was captured at age 15. Though the Obama administration has claimed it intends to erase the taint of torture and abuse from the Bush-era Guantánamo military commissions, the government is trying to use evidence coerced out of the teenage boy in an illegitimate trial eight years later.

Hearings continued Monday and Tuesday in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr, the last Western national still being held at Guantánamo. Now 23, Khadr was 15 when he was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. medic. Unless a plea bargain is reached, Khadr will be the first person prosecuted in a military commission under President Obama.

We have long known, since the creation of the military commissions, that the question of torture is at the heart of these proceedings. Since Omar Khadr first announced he had been abused while detained at Bagram and Guantánamo, we've faced the shameful possibility that he could be convicted using confessions extracted through torture and abuse. This week the commission is examining whether self-incriminating statements Khadr made to interrogators should be excluded from trial because of torture and other abuse.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

Yesterday was day two of pretrial hearings in the case of Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who has been in U.S. detention for a third of his life, since his capture at age 15 in Afghanistan.  The hearing was sidetracked by Khadr’s refusal to come to court because of a medical condition and marred by the military judge’s lack of concern—even though, according to his lawyers, he's in significant pain.

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

An unavoidable consequence of creating a new and ad hoc justice system on the fly is that issues that would be simple and routine in an ordinary criminal trial end up raising questions that are novel and highly contested. This has been a regular feature of the Guantánamo military commissions. We travel here to observe "pre-trial proceedings" with the expectation that the cases will be moving towards trial — only to find out that, because of some arcane dispute about what the new rules mean, trial has become even more remote.