The link is to a video about a boy who was held in Guantanamo for over 3619 days. Omar Khadr was 15 when he was arrested for war crimes. Eventually, Khadr pleaded guilty to the murder of a US soldier. According to a military psychiatrist that observed him, "There was no question that Mr. Khadr suffered life-threatening injuries, as well as concussions, in a firefight that led to his capture, in 2002, at a compound in Afghanistan. He was 15 years old and had been sent there by his father to translate for Libyans training Afghan fighters on how to make improvised explosive devices.
As a result of wounds received from a grenade blast during the attack, an American soldier died 10 days later. Mr. Khadr was the only one of the compound’s residents to survive, and he was charged with throwing the grenade (even though it was an American-made weapon and unlikely to be in the enemy’s arsenal)."
(Could someone explain to me how this is a war crime and not just an act of war?)
The evidence on both sides is undoubtedly shaky. However, what bothered me most, (apart from torturing a 15 year old boy) was how big of idiots the interrogators were. When Khadr showed them his injuries, their only answer was "it looks like its healing well". Even if they didn't have sympathy, shouldn't they had pretended to gain his trust? It seemed like these people had been trained in nothing besides removing their own emotions from the situation. They kept asking him to be honest, (while he insisted he had been), but their reasoning was to further their own purposes without giving him any incentives, and its not like he was likely to trust them.
Khadr repeatedly stated that he gave false information while being tortured, a point that they completely ignored. This is a common result of torture-interrogations. I have a family friend who was in the counter-terorism unit of the NYPD and when they had suspected prisoners in jail, they befriended them, took them out to baseball games and made them feel thankful or loyal. This tactic has had much better results.
So why is Guantanamo still open? About 171 detainees remain after Obama promised to close the facility. Out of 779 detainees, only six have been convicted. Most have been released after years in detention. Indefinite military detention is now part of US law.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/01/201211171414173881.html
"My policy for two years [was] that we [would] not use any of that information [obtained through torture]. Unfortunately people above me retired and left, and [new] people came in and said 'If President Bush says we don't torture them who are you to say we do. We've got all this information we collected that's useful and we need to get them in and use it' … and that's when I resigned."
Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo
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