freedetainees.org » The story of Guantanamo’s child

The story of Guantanamo’s child

Despite Omar Khadr’s gaping wounds, he survived the July 27, 2002 firefight that fatally injured U.S. soldier Christopher Speer.

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.

Omar Khadr: Life as a human mop

RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO

Soldiers wait at the gate of Camp Five, a maximum security prison where Toronto-born detainee Omar

Omar Khadr arrived like the others, stumbling out of the cargo plane after a 27-hour journey, disoriented and only able to take baby steps while chained in leg irons and handcuffs that were attached to a metal belt, a restraint known as the “three-piece suit.”

Omar became Internee Serial Number, or ISN, 766. His “in-process weight” was recorded as 155 pounds, his height, 70 centimeters, or five foot-seven. The blast of Cuban heat in late October was likely Omar’s first welcome to his new home. He got another greeting when he was taken to the detainee hospital for assessment. “Welcome to Israel,” someone said.

Omar had turned 16 while in custody in Afghanistan and that would change how he was treated. It’s believed there were more than a dozen prisoners under the age of 16 who were brought to Guantanamo, including three Afghans aged between 12 and 15, whose detention sparked international outrage and led to their release. Those boys were held in a separate seaside cabin known as Camp Iguana. They were allowed to watch videos, including Castaway, the Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks about life stranded on a tropical island. Naqib Ullah was only 12 when he was captured and had never seen a television set before. He left Guantanamo with an American football and letter from the military saying he was innocent.

Omar had turned 16 just 39 days before arriving in Guantanamo, so in compliance with a post-9/11 Pentagon policy regarding detainees, he was treated as an adult from the day he arrived.

Army Chaplain James Yee recalled being surprised when he first saw Omar, with his scraggly wisps of facial hair, held among the heavily bearded adult detainees. “He definitely seemed out of place in the general population,” Yee said.

Yee was a 35-year-old West Point graduate with a spotless military record, a wife, young daughter and a solid reputation when he went to Guantanamo in November 2002. An American whose grandparents had emigrated to the United States from China, Yee had converted to Islam after graduating from the military academy at West Point in 1990. One of only a handful of Muslim army chaplains, after 9/11 his services were in high demand. But after 10 months at Guantanamo, everything would change. In September 2003, he was arrested and charged with terrorism offences. The Pentagon alleged that Yee had smuggled classified information and letters written by the detainees out of Guantanamo. If convicted of aiding the enemy, he faced the death penalty. Yee spent 76 days in isolation in a military brig in Charleston, South Carolina, while the allegations against him made headlines worldwide. The charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence and Yee retired from the army a broken man.

When Yee first arrived at Guantanamo, full of hope and patriotism, he spent much of his day walking the corridors of the prison speaking to the detainees who sought counselling. One day, Yee stopped outside Omar’s cell. Two things surprised him as he bent down to talk to the teenager.

Omar could speak perfect English, which was uncommon in the blocks. He was also reading a book that had pictures of Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck that Yee knew wasn’t one the library stocked. Omar told Yee the book was a gift from one of his interrogators. He expected Omar to be insulted but instead he appeared delighted.

When Yee came again to the teenager’s cell later that day, Omar was curled up asleep on his steel cot clutching the Disney book to his chest.

Omar was considered an intelligence treasure trove because of his father’s connections and his own travels since 9/11. He was only 10 when he lived briefly on Osama bin Laden’s compound but the Khadr children had been schooled in their father’s politics and had met Al Qaeda’s hierarchy. When the Khadrs fled after 9/11, they crossed paths with many of the terrorist organization’s leaders still being sought.

The interrogators also had a precious piece of evidence that the U.S. soldiers had retrieved after Omar was captured. Following the July 2002 firefight – near the border of Pakistan, where U.S. Special Forces surrounded a suspected Al Qaeda compound – the soldiers had returned to the battle scene. A small group of soldiers was posted to guard the bombed-out compound but the locals had already pillaged it. It was rumoured that the villagers had uncovered two more bodies and, following Islamic tradition, buried them immediately. The soldiers implored them to disclose where the men had been buried so they could be identified but the townspeople refused, so it remained uncertain how many had been in that compound during the fight.

Capt. Mike Silver was part of the team and watched as an excavator tore down the remaining walls. “We found some unexploded ordinance, there were some RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] in there. A couple of them went off because the place was still smoking and burning while we were there.” There was also a largely intact building where recently harvested straw was stored. Just as the building was about to be torn down, the soldiers made a curious find – a plastic bag with some wires, documents and a videocassette.

The tape featured a few frames of Omar. One had him in a room filled with landmines, winding wires around his hand as another man looked as if he was attaching them to the mines. In another shot, Omar’s smiling face was illuminated by the green hue of night vision in what looked like a scouting mission. There were other men in the video, including his father’s friend, Abu Laith al Libi. The interrogators at Guantanamo were keen to know more.

On Jan. 21, 2003, after Omar had been at Guantanamo for almost three months, military interrogators received a new SOP, or Standard Operating Procedure. It began: “History is being made with the Interrogations Operations taking place at Guantanamo Bay.”

The interrogators were expected not just to do their jobs but also to “radically create new methods and methodologies that are needed to complete this mission in defence of our nation,” the manual stated.

“There is much that you will be asked to do which is not in any of your prior training. There are legal, political, strategic and moral issues that influence and affect how operations are conducted in this vital part of Operation Enduring Freedom. You must be aware that your activities and actions are often directed by or reported to the highest levels of government.”

Number One of the new Code of Conduct included: “Treat detainees humanely” and “TORTURE is not authorized under any circumstances.”

Although the tricks of interrogating are complex, there are underlying principles and common tactics. At Fort Huachuca, Ariz – home of the U.S. Army’s intelligence school – soldiers are taught about a dozen techniques. There are “Love Your Comrades” or “Hate Your Comrades” ploys, during which an interrogator tries to convince a prisoner that co-operation would help their fellow fighters, or, if they felt betrayed in their capture, could be a way to exact revenge. There’s the “Mutt-and-Jeff” approach, the good-cop, bad-cop routine.

“Pride Ego Up” or “Ego Down” exploits the prisoners’ insecurities, or conversely, their arrogance. A technique called “Establish Your Identity” involves concocting false and damning allegations to prompt a prisoner to refute them with the truth. Sometimes interrogators offer incentives or sympathy, trying to win trust.

The most popular tactic by far, however, is “Fear Up,” and it works the way it sounds. Interrogators try to intimidate the prisoner and scare him into talking. “The most productive time you can have as an investigator is when people are sh– scared,” explained Jack Hooper, the former head of Canada’s spy service. “You scare them, you intimidate them, you make them uncomfortable to the extent you can make them uncomfortable.” Detainees who knew Omar said he spent many of his early days at Guantanamo in its interrogation booths. Guards would arrive at all hours and tell him he had a “reservation,” which was code for interrogation. Omar would later allege that his interrogations were physically and mentally abusive. If his accounts are accurate, he appears to have had the whole Fort Huachuca playbook tried on him – with some improvisation.

One day during Ramadan in the late fall of 2003, he was taken into an interrogation booth to meet a man who called himself Izmarai, he would later claim. The interrogator said he was from the government in Afghanistan, but on his pants he sported a little American flag. He spoke mainly Farsi, Pashto and some English, and asked questions with words from each. Omar was told if he did not co-operate, he would be sent to Afghanistan, where “they like small boys.” Before Izmarai left, frustrated by Omar’s responses, he wrote in Pashto on a piece of paper: “This detainee must be transferred to Bagram.”

During another interrogation that year, Omar said he was threatened with rendition to Egypt, and, again, the threat of sexual violence was explicit. The interrogator, he said, spit in his face and pulled his hair when he would not answer. In Egypt, the interviewers would not be so nice he was told. He would meet Askri raqm tisa, Soldier Number 9, the guard who raped unco-operative prisoners.

One evening in March 2003, Omar was taken from his cell and in no mood to co-operate. The guards left him in the interrogation booth for hours, short-shackled with his ankles and wrists bound together and secured to a bolt on the floor. Unable to move, he eventually urinated and was left in a pool of urine on the floor.

When the MPs returned and found the soiled teenager, Omar’s lawyers later said, the guards poured pine oil cleaner on his chest and the floor. Keeping him short-shackled, the guards used Omar as a human mop to clean up the mess. Omar was returned to his cell and for two days the guards refused to give him fresh clothes.

Ruhal Ahmed’s cell was directly beside Omar’s for most of 2003 and he became a surrogate older brother to him. Ahmed would watch the teenager return from interrogations, saddened both by the times Omar would return smiling and those when it was clear he was disturbed. “Sometimes he’d be happy because some of the interrogators would treat him nicely,” Ahmed recalled. “Sometimes he’d come back and he’d talk, `Oh they gave me this, they gave me that, and this, I watched this film.’ Sometimes he’d come back and he wouldn’t be talking and we’d know, okay, we shouldn’t ask him anything. It was quite difficult to ask somebody what happened to you. We’d just ask, `Are you all right?’ He’d say, `Yeah, I’m fine.’ ”

But then Omar would retreat to the back of his cell, put a blanket over his head and sob quietly.

During his early months at Guantanamo, Omar was still recovering from his injuries and would spend days in the prison hospital.

He would often get one of the best rooms, adjacent to the nursing station and separate from other wounded or ill. Chaplain Yee went to the hospital every day and looked forward to his visits since it was the only facility that had reliable air conditioning.

Often he would sit beside Omar’s hospital bed and talk or sometimes just sit there and say nothing. Omar was in pain most of the time and did not seek Yee’s spiritual guidance. Despite some awkward silences, though, they seemed to draw comfort from each other.

Omar was well-liked by others at Camp Three, and seemed to prefer the company of the English-speaking prisoners with whom he could talk about movies or the cartoons some of the interrogators let him watch.

Ahmed spent hours telling Omar every scene and twist of every movie he could recall – Braveheart, Die Hard and of course, Harry Potter, which was a favourite among the prisoners. There was camaraderie among the detainees at Camp Three, which Omar would miss when he was put in isolation.

Detainees were also ingenious at spreading information from one cellblock to the next, even though they were not supposed to communicate and their movements were restricted.

There were times the guards themselves would spread news such as the capture of a high-ranking Al Qaeda figure. There was much celebration among the soldiers after Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had been found, even though his capture meant little to detainees from Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the fall of 2003, there was one story that everyone talked about. Omar’s father had been killed. The guards told the detainees that Ahmed Said Khadr had been part of bin Laden’s inner circle and had been killed by Pakistani forces on October 3. Omar said little. “He used to hide his emotions away from people,” recalled Ahmed. “You can just imagine a sixteen-year-old kid if something happens. They don’t usually share their emotions, they just kind of keep it inside them and when they do show their emotions, it’s usually to their moms or whatever, not going to be some stranger next door.”

If Omar had felt alone in Bagram, his father’s death only intensified this sense of isolation. He wrote often to his grandparents in Scarborough, the only address he had for his relatives, signing his name with a little heart in the corner.

“I pray for you very much,” he wrote in one letter, “don’t forgat me from your pray’rs.”

Khadr was once held in isolation.

About the author

Toronto Star national security reporter Michelle Shephard has been following the story of Omar Khadr since his capture by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in July 2002. Excerpted with permission of the publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc, Copyright (C) 2008 by Michelle Shephard. The book is available at bookstores on March 24, at online bookstores, and from the Wiley web site at www.wiley.com or call 1-800-225-5945.

March 09, 2008

The Pentagon has charged Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr with war crimes, including murder for the death of U.S. Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer. This 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. it has a duty to protect him 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 July 2002 firefight where Speer received his fatal injuries, to his years behind bars. Yesterday, in an exclusive edited excerpt of Guantanamo’s Child, Shephard revealed previously unknown details about Khadr’s early days in detention at Bagram. Read Part One at by clicking here. Today, the story moves to Guantanamo Bay.