Inside the life of Guantanamo’s child
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The Pentagon has charged Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr with war crimes, including murder in the death of U.S. Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer. Next week he will have another pre-trial hearing at the U.S. navy base in southeast Cuba.
Toronto-born Khadr was 15 when he was shot and captured in Afghanistan and the United Nations has warned the U.S. that it has a duty to protect Khadr as a “child soldier,” and work to rehabilitate rather than prosecute him.
Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard in her upcoming book chronicles Khadr’s life from his early years growing up among Al Qaeda’s elite in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the 2002 firefight where Speer received his fatal injuries, to his time spent behind bars. Today, in an exclusive edited excerpt of Guantanamo’s Child, Shephard reveals previously unknown details about Khadr’s first days in U.S. detention.
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With the majestic, snow-dripped Hindu Kush mountain range as a backdrop, the U.S. military base in Bagram rises up from the dusty earth, an eyesore on an otherwise picturesque scene. It’s not surprising that after 9/11 the Americans used Bagram’s flat, elevated land, about 30 miles (48 kilometres) north of Kabul, for their northern base. The area has a history of providing sanctuary for the country’s interlopers and the crumbling architecture is a testament to the battles they had fought.
A haunted-looking building in one corner of the U.S. base is a former Soviet aircraft machine shop that the Americans converted to a prison when they arrived in 2001. The low-slung, concrete-and-sheet-metal building with blown-out windows boarded up with plywood is large enough to cover a city block. Inside, the soldiers divided the floor into cages separated by concertina wire. The soldiers called the prison the Bagram Collection Point or BCP; detainees called it The Barn.
Detainees were not supposed to be held at Bagram long but there were exceptions. Moazzam Begg was one. The 34-year-old was different from the other prisoners, many of whom had never left their small villages, let alone Afghanistan. Begg had been born and raised in Britain, the son of immigrant Muslim parents who wanted their children to reap the benefits of life in the West. Begg began to practise Islam in his late teens during a trip with relatives to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. When he heard about the plight of Muslims in Bosnia, he travelled to the Balkans to work with an aid organization. Although he was fit and muscular, at five-foot-three, the mujahideen in Bosnia did not consider Begg a fighter. Philosophical in his outlook, Begg had always gravitated to the arts, acquiring his father’s love of poetry and literature.
During his 20s, Begg opened an Islamic bookshop in London. Britain’s domestic security service, MI5, raided the shop in 1999 and accused Begg of inciting Islamic extremism. He was charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, but charges were dropped due to lack of evidence. Then in July 2001, Begg moved with his wife, Zaynab, and their three children from Britain to Afghanistan, in search of a life true to Islam. He worked to build a girls’ school in Kabul, a rare exception for the Taliban who had outlawed the education of females. When American bombs began to fall in Afghanistan three months later, Begg moved his family to Islamabad. But authorities came looking for him. Just after midnight on Jan. 31, 2002, Pakistani and CIA agents burst into his house and threw a hood over his head. He was accused of having high-level Al Qaeda connections and taken to Afghanistan. He wouldn’t see his family again for three years.
Begg was held at the American prison in Kandahar before being transferred to Bagram. He was considered a high-priority captive and every security agency wanted to talk with him about Bosnia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. For the most part, Begg was compliant. In fact, one British interrogator described Begg to New York Times reporter Tim Golden as “devastatingly reasonable.”
Begg’s advantage was that he spoke English and for guards who were battling the endless boredom of long days away from home, talking to Begg was a welcome break. As he sat with the guards one day in late July 2002, he was told that a dangerous detainee was on his way. Within hours, the prison was abuzz with the news.
When Omar Khadr arrived at Bagram after the firefight in July 2002, his reputation had preceded him. “The guards told me they’ve just brought in this young kid who was extremely belligerent, extremely hostile; that a vehicle-load of Americans just happened to be going past him delivering aid and he just lobbed a grenade at them,” Begg recalled.
Omar was first taken to the base hospital so his injuries could be assessed and treated. Not long after, he was taken into The Barn.
Begg couldn’t take his eyes off the skinny, stooped-shouldered Omar as he was led past the other prisoners, up the stairs and into an interrogation booth. Omar looked young, even for 15, and his injuries were some of the worst Begg had seen.
A few weeks after arriving, much of which he spent in interrogation, Omar was transferred to Begg’s cell. The dozen or so Muslim men who shared the cell had no privacy, and using sawed-off crates as toilets was especially humiliating for the detainees, many of whom had stomach ailments. Blankets had once been used as curtains but guards had seized them after a prisoner used a blanket to hide a hole he was digging. Talking wasn’t allowed, but some detainees risked whispered conversations. If they were caught, they were brought to the front of the cell and forced to stand with their arms outstretched, a hood often placed over their heads.
Omar retreated immediately to the back of the cell and sat down. Begg said he heard one of the guards say to him, “I hope you pay for what you’ve done,” but Omar didn’t look up. There were raw scars on his chest where there had once been two deep holes. Shrapnel had punctured the skin along his arms and legs. While the nicks and scrapes can sometimes look minor, they have a cruel habit of causing pain for years to come. Doctors will often not remove embedded shrapnel, preferring to allow the body to work on its own to eject foreign objects. While considered safer than extraction, it is incredibly painful as the shrapnel works its way to the surface, eventually bursting through like blood blisters.
Omar’s introduction to Bagram was harsher than that of most detainees. Begg said the guards singled him out for the worst treatment, payback for allegedly killing one of their own. They would make him perform Sisyphean tasks, such as stacking heavy boxes and crates that the guards would knock over when he had finished and then force him to start again. Each time, they walked past his cell they would yell: Murderer! Killer! Butcher! “It was very, very hard to hear that because it was evident he was just a kid. Not only that, he was terribly wounded,” said Begg.
The guards referred to the detainees as BOB, the Bad Odor Boys.
“Every little operation was given the suffix `Bob.’ `Operation Wash-Bob’ would be to take prisoners out to shower,” Begg wrote in his memoir, Enemy Combatant. “Operation Sun-Bob was getting everybody in The Barn out into the sun for a certain amount of time.”
Omar, with his scarred body, became known as Buckshot Bob. After a month in detention, the guards no longer called him by his name or number. He was just Buckshot.
DAMIEN CORSETTI was one of the interrogators at Bagram who had been given little training and lots of responsibility. He weighed close to 300 pounds, stood more than six feet tall, had a thick neck, dark bushy eyebrows that hung heavily over his eyes, and had a booming voice he used to shout at the prisoners when they first arrived. He was an intimidator and he was good at it. It didn’t matter what he said to the detainees, who didn’t speak English. Sometimes he would pick up a box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and scream the ingredients at the prisoners who didn’t realize ascorbic acid or hydrochloride were vitamins, not threats. During his seven months in Bagram, Corsetti logged more than 3,000 hours in the interrogation booths. Corsetti was eventually charged with beating and sexually humiliating a Saudi prisoner at Bagram who claimed that Corsetti had pulled out his penis during an interrogation and screamed: “This is your God.” During the trial, his lawyer portrayed Corsetti as a foot soldier led by a commander who demanded results at any cost: “The President of the United States doesn’t know what the rules are. The Secretary of Defence doesn’t know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. (private first class) to know what the rules are?” lawyer Capt. Joseph Owens asked.
On June 1, 2006, Corsetti was acquitted of all charges and five months later, he left the army with an honourable discharge.
Corsetti was part of a screening team that visited Omar when he first arrived at the base hospital. When Corsetti saw the hole on the top of Omar’s back, he held a Coke can to the wound. “You could have fit that can of Coke in the back of his head. He was really messed up,” Corsetti recalled.
As Omar was questioned, Corsetti kept an eye on the machines that kept track of the teenager’s vitals. “You could see his pulse elevating on the machine and his respiration increasing if he got nervous. We’re taught to see the signs of it physically, but you can never really see it actually happening on the monitor in front of you,” said Corsetti.
Corsetti wasn’t Omar’s interrogator but made a point of talking to the teenager as often as he could, bringing him chocolates or letting him watch movies on his laptop.
They talked mainly about basketball but sometimes they would talk about Omar’s family. “Honestly, he seemed like a young kid who got swept up into something because of his family ties and never got the opportunity to make a choice for himself whether it was right or wrong,” Corsetti said.
Begg used to watch Corsetti and Omar talk, happy to see the teenager being shown some compassion. “He treated Omar very well after he got to speak to him, after he got to know him. I think that’s indicative to how people reacted to Omar,” Begg said. “There’s Omar the myth, and there’s Omar the person.”
DURING THE WEEKS that Begg and Omar shared a cell, Begg negotiated a daily half-hour of physical activity for all the detainees. Begg delighted in the 30 minutes he was permitted to walk, stretch or do push-ups. Normally, any movement was forbidden. But the other detainees, mostly from rural Pakistan and Afghanistan, had never exercised in their lives.
“One of the things I found very difficult was to motivate the people there to do things and I noticed when the Americans saw that nobody was doing anything they said, `Well, if nobody’s going to do anything, there’s no point in you guys having this time.’”
Omar’s injuries still restricted his movement and he often winced while performing simple tasks. But after the guards threatened to revoke the exercise time, Omar, noticing Begg’s distress, started to stretch awkwardly alongside him during the allotted time each day. “It really moved me because he was terribly wounded and for him to have done that was again indicative of the kind of person he was, is.”
While most detainees spoke about their parents, wives and children, Omar said little about his family to Begg. Omar had been told during an interrogation that his brother Abdurahman was now working for the Americans.
He knew that Abdurahman had been captured in November 2001 by the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban group that had aligned with the U.S., but he didn’t know where he had been taken. Begg said this news depressed Omar but that he was not altogether surprised that his older brother, who had always rebelled against his father, was working with his father’s enemy.
In late October as the nights began to cool and wind storms coated the air base in a thick layer of dust, Omar’s name was written in blue on a board outside his cell. Begg knew what this meant and went to wish his young Canadian friend luck.
“You know, you are fortunate, because there are people who actually are concerned about you,” Omar told Begg. “I don’t have anyone.”
Omar was soon transferred to Cell Number One. On Oct. 28, 2002, he was flown out of Afghanistan.
Tomorrow, this journal will continue the report.
http://www.thestar.com/News/Ideas/article/326337
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