Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Miami Herald
March 19, 2008 In court papers, a Canadian being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base claimed that U.S. interrogators used the threat of rape.
By Carol Rosenberg
WASHINGTON -- In a fresh document from the Guantanamo war court files, Canadian captive Omar Khadr alleges that he was repeatedly threatened with rape as an interrogation technique in Afghanistan and at U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
The partially censored nine-page affidavit, signed by Khadr on Feb. 22, covers old ground, including allegations of abuse at Guantánamo that emerged in 2005, prompting a Navy criminal investigation.
But the document includes never-before revealed allegations, such as the rape threats and a partially censored description of regaining consciousness after his capture to discover he was being interrogated in an American field hospital in Afghanistan. He was 15.
Once released from medical care to the Bagram detention center, he said, ``I was interrogated many, many times. For about the first two weeks to a month that I was there I would be brought into the interrogation room on a stretcher.''
A military spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, repeated the Pentagon's long-held conviction that Guantánamo captives are treated humanely and that any credible allegations of mistreatment are investigated and dealt with.
''In this case, we have no evidence to substantiate these claims,'' he wrote in an e-mail. He also noted that all approved interrogation techniques have been published in the Army Field Manual on Interrogations and that an al Qaida training manual ``teaches its operatives to make false claims of abuse.''
The details are emerging in the military trial case of Khadr, now 21, accused of the grenade killing of a U.S. Army commando in a July 2002 firefight. The document was admitted to court last week as part of the pretrial arguments over access to potential witnesses for Khadr's upcoming summertime trial before U.S. military officers, called a military commission.
Meantime, the Canadian's lawyers have been searching for interrogators and other witnesses to his capture, in which he was shot twice in the back in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound. They also want witnesses to the interrogations in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.
The lawyers are seeking to punch holes in the prosecution case alleging that Khadr, as an al Qaeda conspirator since age 10, was the only enemy combatant who could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., in a firefight near Khost, Afghanistan.
Last week, the defense revealed at a pretrial hearing that the brigade commander at the firefight wrote two accounts, with the same date. In the first account, a brigade commander identified to the public as ''Lt. Col. W,'' wrote that the grenade thrower was killed on the spot. In the second, according to Navy Cmdr. William Kuebler, written two months later, Lt. Col. W said only that the enemy was ''engaged,'' leaving open the possibility that he had survived.
Khadr was the only survivor.
Now the affidavit, a 63-item statement by the Canadian who grew up between Toronto, South Asia and U.S. detention, offers Khadr's most comprehensive account of his alleged treatment. The document is riddled with threats of rape wielded by the United States and its allies.
''On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,'' he alleges in Item 23. By Item 55, he has been transferred to Guantánamo, and he is taken to interrogation with an Afghan man who ''told me that I would be sent to Afghanistan and raped.'' In Item 56, he says, an interrogator pulled his hair, spit in his face and threatened to bring in an Egyptian ``to rape me.''
March 19, 2008 In court papers, a Canadian being held at the Guantanamo Bay naval base claimed that U.S. interrogators used the threat of rape.
By Carol Rosenberg
WASHINGTON -- In a fresh document from the Guantanamo war court files, Canadian captive Omar Khadr alleges that he was repeatedly threatened with rape as an interrogation technique in Afghanistan and at U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
The partially censored nine-page affidavit, signed by Khadr on Feb. 22, covers old ground, including allegations of abuse at Guantánamo that emerged in 2005, prompting a Navy criminal investigation.
But the document includes never-before revealed allegations, such as the rape threats and a partially censored description of regaining consciousness after his capture to discover he was being interrogated in an American field hospital in Afghanistan. He was 15.
Once released from medical care to the Bagram detention center, he said, ``I was interrogated many, many times. For about the first two weeks to a month that I was there I would be brought into the interrogation room on a stretcher.''
A military spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, repeated the Pentagon's long-held conviction that Guantánamo captives are treated humanely and that any credible allegations of mistreatment are investigated and dealt with.
''In this case, we have no evidence to substantiate these claims,'' he wrote in an e-mail. He also noted that all approved interrogation techniques have been published in the Army Field Manual on Interrogations and that an al Qaida training manual ``teaches its operatives to make false claims of abuse.''
The details are emerging in the military trial case of Khadr, now 21, accused of the grenade killing of a U.S. Army commando in a July 2002 firefight. The document was admitted to court last week as part of the pretrial arguments over access to potential witnesses for Khadr's upcoming summertime trial before U.S. military officers, called a military commission.
Meantime, the Canadian's lawyers have been searching for interrogators and other witnesses to his capture, in which he was shot twice in the back in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound. They also want witnesses to the interrogations in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.
The lawyers are seeking to punch holes in the prosecution case alleging that Khadr, as an al Qaeda conspirator since age 10, was the only enemy combatant who could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., in a firefight near Khost, Afghanistan.
Last week, the defense revealed at a pretrial hearing that the brigade commander at the firefight wrote two accounts, with the same date. In the first account, a brigade commander identified to the public as ''Lt. Col. W,'' wrote that the grenade thrower was killed on the spot. In the second, according to Navy Cmdr. William Kuebler, written two months later, Lt. Col. W said only that the enemy was ''engaged,'' leaving open the possibility that he had survived.
Khadr was the only survivor.
Now the affidavit, a 63-item statement by the Canadian who grew up between Toronto, South Asia and U.S. detention, offers Khadr's most comprehensive account of his alleged treatment. The document is riddled with threats of rape wielded by the United States and its allies.
''On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,'' he alleges in Item 23. By Item 55, he has been transferred to Guantánamo, and he is taken to interrogation with an Afghan man who ''told me that I would be sent to Afghanistan and raped.'' In Item 56, he says, an interrogator pulled his hair, spit in his face and threatened to bring in an Egyptian ``to rape me.''