My country tortures children

This kid is 16 years old:



Omar Khadr has been at Gitmo since he was 15. About a year after he was captured in Afghanistan, he spoke to Canadian officials. Someone sneaked a camera into an air duct and videoed ten minutes of the conversation, in which he begs the officials to help him. He shows them injuries. He pulls his hair and rocks back and forth. He's crying hard. He says, bizarrely, that he's "lost" his eyes and feet.

He's not a child any more. He's 21 now, and not to talk down to my readers by pointing out the obvious, but he's spent the last of his childhood in a maximum-security prison -- no, a supermax prison -- no, alone in a cage on an island, going blind in his injured eye, with almost no human contact. He would try to talk to the guards (born in Toronto, he's a native speaker of English), but they would not respond to him, except when they were randomly dragging him from his cage to interrogate him.

This kind of treatment resulted in hundreds of incidents of self-harm and hunger strikes between 2002 and 2006, and led three adult Gitmo prisoners to suicide. But the official in the video accuses Khadr of putting on a show, squeezing out crocodile tears so that the Canadian embassy will swoop in and save him.

Not that the Canadian embassy would, even if their intelligence service wanted to. Ottawa is deferring to the U.S. military and won't intervene.

Watch that video again. (I can't.) Imagine it's your own child. If you don't have kids or can't imagine being a parent to a 16-year-old, put yourself back into your high school shoes. This exercise works especially well if you were brainwashed by your religious extremist dad and then recruited into some military organization in your early teens, like JROTC. But in any event, you're 16. You are 16. Whether you spent your pre-Gitmo time thinking about the junior prom or thinking about joining al-Qaeda, you are 16. You've been recovering from serious, life-threatening injuries alone, in a cage, on an island. The guards, who not police but are marines who routinely thrash the prisoners for no reason, have been depriving you of sleep for weeks on end (and not just when you can't sleep for the sounds of other prisoners screaming from their own beatings). Then, after a year of this treatment, you finally talk to someone you think can help, and he says, "You want to go back to Canada? Well, there's not anything I can do about that."

His "Guantanamo military commission" -- it's like a trial, only not -- will be held in October.