[Ppnews] Afghani Teen Put to Trial at Guanátanmo

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/worthington10172007.html

October 17, 2007


The Afghani Teen Put to Trial at Guanátanmo


The Case of Omar Khadr

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Alone in the civilized world (and, it should be 
noted, in most other countries regarded as 
barbaric dictatorships), the US administration 
has a penchant for ignoring international laws 
regarding the legal distinctions between adults 
and children, subjecting teenagers, in 
Afghanistan and Guantánamo, to brutal detention 
without charge or trial, and, in the case of Omar 
Khadr, who was 15 years old at the time of his 
capture, also hauling him up before a lawless 
show trial by Military Commission, designed to 
prevent all mention of torture by US forces, and 
to secure a pre-ordained verdict of guilt. Dozens 
of teenagers ­ some as young as 12 or 13 ­ have 
been held in Guantánamo over the years, but until 
now Khadr was the only one to face a trial.

Last week, however, in what was supposed to be a 
demonstration of the efficacy and justice of the 
Military Commissions, the Pentagon announced that 
an Afghan named Mohamed Jawad would be joining 
Khadr, Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who was one of 
Osama bin Laden's drivers, and David Hicks, who 
was returned to Australia in May after a plea 
bargain, as the fourth "terror suspect" to face 
the Commissions since their revival in March this 
year, after four years of wrangling and humiliation for the government.

A minimum of research reveals that, according to 
the Pentagon's own records, Jawad was born to 
Afghan parents in Pakistan in 1985, and was 
therefore only 17 when he was captured. This 
means nothing to the administration, of course. 
At a press conference in April 2003, when the 
"child prisoners" story first broke, Donald 
Rumsfeld pointedly described the juvenile 
detainees as "not children," and General Richard 
Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 
said that they "may be juveniles, but they're not 
on the Little League team anywhere. They're on a 
major league team, and it's a terrorist team, and 
they're in Guantánamo for a very good reason ­ 
for our safety, for your safety."

Last year, in response to media reports 
criticizing the number of juveniles held at 
Guantánamo, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey 
Gordon also weighed in, insisting, in defiance of 
reason, "There is no international standard 
concerning the age of individuals who engage in 
combat operations," and adding, "Age is not a 
determining factor in the detention [of those] 
engaged in armed conflict against our forces or 
in support to those fighting against us."

What is just as astonishing about Jawad's case, 
however, is that it was chosen at all. According 
to the AFP, he is to be charged with "attempted 
murder in violation of the laws of war," and 
"intentionally causing injury for allegedly 
throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle, 
wounding two US soldiers and an Afghan 
interpreter," but there are doubts over whether 
he actually threw the grenade, and, in any case, 
after nearly six years of chest-thumping claims 
that Guantánamo houses "the worst of the worst," 
the decision to prosecute a teenager, who had no 
connection whatsoever with al-Qaeda, and who, at 
best, was a minor Afghan insurgent, is both desperate and risible.

For his part, Jawad has long denied that he 
actually threw the grenade. In his administrative 
review in December 2005, he denied an allegation 
that an individual approached him at his shop in 
Khost in October 2002, offering him an 
opportunity to make money by killing Americans, 
saying, "I don't have a shop in Khost. I don't 
know anyone to give me money." He accepted that, 
in December 2002, at a mosque in Miran Shah, 
Pakistan, he met four people who offered him a 
job clearing mines in Afghanistan, but denied 
other allegations that he received training "to 
use AK-47s, rocket launchers, machine guns and 
hand grenades," that he trained with 
Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (the anti-American 
militia headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a US 
favorite during the war against the Soviet 
Union), and that he "was identified as being at 
[a] jihadi madrassa before the Americans came to 
Afghanistan," where he learned how to throw 
grenades and was "seen with a fake plastic 
grenade in his hand." "This statement is not 
true," he said. "It is a lie. I never went to a 
religious school. I have not heard of those names 
before. I only went to school in Pakistan."

The specific reason for Jawad's detention in 
Guantánamo involves a grenade attack on US forces 
on December 17, 2002. According to the 
allegations, two people ordered him and a second 
person "to position themselves near the mosque 
and to wait for an American target to pass. As an 
American vehicle passed, the second individual 
ordered the detainee to throw a grenade into the 
vehicle." Jawad responded, "Nobody asked me to 
throw a grenade. I have never thrown a grenade. I 
don't understand how to throw it." He then became 
agitated after it was alleged that he had "stated 
originally he was not the person who was supposed 
to throw the grenade, but that the grenades were 
passed to him at the last minute ... The other 
individuals told the detainee to throw the 
grenade, so he did." He insisted, "That is not 
true. I told them [the interrogators] in my 
statement that I was the person who did not throw the grenade."

He also denied subsequent allegations that, while 
he was throwing the grenade, the second 
individual "fled the scene," that he was "caught 
by a local police officer at the site of the 
explosion," and that he "made a written 
confession to this attack, signed it, and marked 
it with his fingerprint." Crucially, he said that 
the local police took him to jail and "they 
tortured me. They beat me. They beat me a lot. 
One person told me, 'If you don't confess, they 
are going to kill you'. So, I told them anything they wanted to hear."

Having not heard this story before, the Presiding 
Officer, in a stunning display of the tortuous 
bureaucracy overlaying the Guantánamo regime, 
declared that Jawad's allegation of torture and 
abuse "triggers the mandatory reporting aspect of 
the Office of Administrative Review for the 
Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC) Standard 
Operating Procedure (SOP) [with regards to 
reporting allegations of abuse and torture]." 
This was dropped, however, when Jawad then 
confirmed to the Board that the abusive treatment 
had taken place in Kabul, at the hands of Afghan 
soldiers, and added, "I have never seen or 
endured any torture in Bagram or here in Cuba by the Americans."

Returning to the subject of the grenade attack, 
Jawad denied an allegation that he "told a senior 
Afghani police officer that he was proud of what 
he had done, and if he were let go he would do it 
again," and responded to an allegation that "A 
senior Afghani official stated he heard the 
detainee admit to throwing the grenade at the two 
United States soldiers," by saying that he was 
probably overheard when he made his false 
confession. He again insisted that "someone else 
threw the grenade," and explained that the person 
who had invited him to come to Afghanistan to 
clear mines had given him a grenade to put in his 
pocket (although he did not know what it was) and 
had then left him unattended for a while in the 
market. He said that, while shopping for raisins, 
he took the grenade out of his pocket and put it 
on the sack of raisins, but that when the 
shopkeeper saw it he "told me it was a bomb and 
that I should go and throw it in the river. I put 
the thing back in my pocket and I was running and 
shouting to stay away, it's a bomb! When I got 
close to the river, people [the police] caught me."

Mohamed Jawad may well be guilty of the grenade 
attack, but it is doubtful that the truth will be 
aired adequately in a Military Commission. It is, 
for example, beyond the bounds of belief that the 
Afghan soldiers who allegedly tortured him will 
be sought and found in Afghanistan and brought to 
Guantánamo to testify. Above all, however, the 
whole sad story, whether true or not, is nothing 
like the kind of major prosecution of a senior 
al-Qaeda operative that the American public might 
be expecting after six years, the spending of 
untold billions of dollars, and the demolition of the rule of law.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the 
author of 
'<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/counterpunchmaga>The 
Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 
Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (to be 
published by Pluto Press in October 2007).

He can be reached at: 
<mailto:andy at andyworthington.co.uk>andy at andyworthington.co.uk




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