Legal Commentary

Federal Judge Denies Relief to Guantanamo Teenage Detainee

By Jeralyn

Canadian Omar Khadr, facing a military commissions trial, got no relief today in federal court when the judge refused to block his trial. Now 22, he's been held at Guantanamo since age 15 when captured during a gunfight in Afghanistan.

Khadr argued in pleadings in U.S. District Court that the Military Commissions Act doesn't give the military the ability to try juveniles. He also challenged his status as an "enemy combatant" saying U.S. law doesn't recognize juveniles as members of groups like al-Qaida; and he said that he should have been detained in "a rehabilitation and reintegration program appropriate for former child soldiers" instead of being mixed in with adults at Guantanamo Bay.

He has also alleged previously he was tortured. [More...]

Michelle Shephard, author of Guantanamo's Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr (Wiley), provides reviews in today's Toronto Star of several books on Guantanamo. Among those recommended:

• American lawyer and Pashto-speaking translator Mahvish Khan's My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me (Public Affairs, 302 pages, $27.95).

• British activist and historian Andy Worthington's The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press, 338 pages, $30).

• Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 334 pages, $28.50).

• British lawyer and prisoners' rights advocate Clive Stafford Smith's Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 308 pages, $19.99)

Full post as published by TalkLeft on November 24, 2008 (boomark / email).