Canadian boy held in Guantanamo from the age of 16

This 16-year old boy has been held since 2002. No charges, no evidence against him.

I expect former and present members of the US armed forces to approve such procedures.

I condemn such actions. Why now, a few months before they send GW back to Texas, the sudden rush trying to get fake convictions in front of a questionable military tribunal?

Okay, He's actually 21 years old now. He has been charged and there is Video and eywitness evidence that seems to support some of the charges (but not all of them). He first faced a military tribunal in 2005, so it doesn't seem like anything is being rushed. Other than those points your assesment was spot on.

I imagine that any trial or tribunal that reaches any conclusion other than complete innocence, 20 million dollars for suffering and false imprisonment, and a lengthy statement detailing how evil the United states is would be seen by you as a sham court that was just set up as eyewash.

I would change the title of the thread to "allegedly". What proof do you have that he was tortured?

Cuba, what a place. I would never go there.
Can we please turn this thread into an American bashing one. We haven't had one for quite a while now. I think it's overdue.

you can see a video of his interrogation here

At the time this video was shot Kadr was 16 years old and had been kept up for 21 days in a practice called "frequent flyer" where inmates were woken and forced to move cells every three hours causing so much disruption that sleep more than a few minutes at a time was impossible. In the video he is clearly very distressed. Along with waterboarding I would call this 'frequent flyer' treatment torture since it was intended to be so distressing and intolerable that the prisoners would "break".

When he is tried, he will be tried for a warcrime that was committed when he was 15 years old. Pentagon records show that 21 teenagers or even children have been detained at Guantanamo.

By anyones standards Guantanamo is an abomination. That it is ostensibly there in a fight to preserve democratic freedom is rank hypocrisy. This case only goes to show graphically how monstrous the whole thing is.

the Pentagon have confirmed he was sleep deprived for 21 days before this interogation by making him move cells every three hours. They don't call that torture but most reasonable people would.

I should note that the practice along with chinese water toorture (analagous to waterboarding) was used against Allied POWs by the Japanese and condemned as torture then.

well, I for one believe that torture does take place in Guantanamo, and if you don't want call it torture, then call it a prison style that takes humanity back into the medieval times.
It is more scary that a 16yrs old boy and now 22 years old is in Guantanamo when a rehabilitation centre would be more appropriate.

Why they don't just truth drug them to get them to tell everything they know? Surely that would be quicker than all these torturing procedures.

cos they are highly unreliable. just like torture, really, but without the fun of hurting someone.

apparently a quick Google search and I found this that says they cant because it is actually classed as torture by international law


also wiki says they are unreliable and we all know how much we can trust wikipedia

Interesting reading: Khadr's affidavit from Feb 22, 2008 describing his capture and experiences. It has been redacted, with words and phrases blacked out. But it is still very readable.

ptresumably Conqy is about to appear and tell us all we are 'Anti-American' to be apalled at this. And then BadBob will come on and claim that Amritsar and Dachau prove the Brits and the Germans are worse anyway.

I bet you would enjoy yourself in prison BtC. I don't think prison is a good deterent for homosexual criminals - it is kind of like sending them to a holiday camp.

That would have to be quite the "rehabilitation center" if indeed he did kill a person and wound another. Then there are his connections to Al-Qaeda.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/16/...in3516048.shtml

I personally think that people captured in Afghanistan should have been detained there. As for interrogation, as I understand it the most effective techniques are generally those in which an interrogator "befriends" the person being interrogated.

That's funny!

I wouldn't call that torture and I am a reasonable person.

That affidavit is a bit messed up. some of the stuff he says would make anyone crack and just tell what the officials wanted they wanted to hear

Believing something is not proof.

OK - we'll all come around to your place, do it to you and see how you like it then...

" no evidence against him "

Maybe I'm a cold heartless bastard but the what the fük is a 15 year old boy doing in a war zone anyway. So his father had already been added to the UN list of Al qaeda members in 1999 and was finally killed in a Pakistani Raid on Al Qaeda in 2003. Omar Khadr was captured after a 4 hour firefight at a militants house where they found a large weapons cashe, bomb making equipment and videos, ( He was in one video holding bomb making equipment). When the the compound was finally blown up and the trooops went in, a grenade was thrown from the room Omar Khadr was in, killing one american. Khadr was then shot twice and captured. When he was captured, he repeatedly asked to be killed .

Theres no justification for Torture, but at the same time I struggle to feel any sympathy for him

what would you call it then? remember the quote above about truth drugs:


sleep deprivation is incredibly mentally and physically stressful. The Guiness Book of records stopped recording records for sleep deprivation under medical advice because of the extreme mental damage it was causing some record attemptees. And I can only assume that the authorities at Guantanamo were using it to 'break' the prisoners.

You also have to ask yourself whether such a cruel and unusual treatment could be used on prisoners resident on US soil. I would guess that it would not be legal there just as waterboarding would not.

I wasn't caught in a war zone under suspicious circumstances.


I would call it an interrogation technique.

Of course internal security services use sleep deprivation. It is a little naive to think that they don't. It is a standard interrogation strategy.

But if it's not torture, then it can't be that bad, surely...

there's a differnce between discomfort and torture. You can't classify everything more stressful than "The big comfy chair" as Torture.

I'm amazed at how many parents have been totured for years by their new borns, and never even realized it. I know I was one, and for longer than 21 days...and I had to go work!

Eh?

Just because an interrogation technique is bad to the subject doesn't make it torture. That is the whole point.

These people aren't Teletubbies. They are, in the main, dangerous people who had wishes to kill and injure soldiers of my country and of other countries. Use of the most powerful techniques to get information out of them is perfectly justified.

The "most powerful techniques" would be torture...

Sez who? Your mum? Your uncle Adolf? The person running your ego management course?

I would say that any duress intended to put so much stress on the subject that they were forced to speak should be considered as 'Torture'. Amnesty certainly seems to consider it so.

"The most powerful techniques within reason" I probably should have said.

Waterboarding is not something I like, but I can see the use of it. Sleep deprivation is another thing - there is no physical harm as such inflicted on the subject which is one way of drawing a line.

A typical wooly liberal contribution. Anything interesting to add?

I agree with Nick. force should be used to get information out of people, it works. what I don't agree with is if the procedure to do so gets to the point where the detainee will say anything, even lies just to get the people interrogating them to stop but then different people have different breaking points.

So you're in the anything more stressful than the comfy chair is torture Camp?

Here is the definition from the UN and generally accepted by international law.

The UN Convention against Torture definition provides that torture is “any act by which severe
pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such
purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for
an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or
coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such
pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a
public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering
arising from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions�.This definition has been held to constitute customary international law.

The key feature of this definition is "Severe pain or suffering". I don't think that scaring the shit out of someone, waterboarding someone, or disrupting someones sleep pattern as Severe pain or suffering. They are disconcerting, uncomfortable and maybe painful at times, but don't qualify as torture under the internationally accepted definition.

So you think that people can only be tortured if they are left with physical wounds then? Do you believe that psychological torture does not exist then?

Also, long term sleep deprivation can cause psychological problems and brain damage.

Has any US court ruled on the use of sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique? I see no specific mention of it in the UN Convention on Torture.

Sorry, BTC, Amnesty International is not a legitimate authority on this issue. And as for the Guiness Book of World Records, anyone attempting to set a sleep record there was engaging in very extreme activity- probably going days without sleep. It's not a germain comparison unless a person being interrogated is kept from sleeping at all for days (something I strongly doubt would ever happen).

And how are you going to recognise what is useful information and what is just a detainee saying anything to make the torture stop? Especially if, as you say "people have different breaking points"

No I don't think that, I was making the point that lots of people draw a line where physical damage is done.

If the interrogator does too much damage to the subject, it is his loss.

As you sort of state in the last part, that's a hard line to draw. If the US military is trained to resist waterboarding, is it ok to use that as a tactic for interrogating marines but not others?

Asking Amnesty for a view on torture is like asking Arthur Scargill for a view on Mrs. Thatcher. A red rag to a bull with predictable outcomes.

Not true - it is defined the same way by the UN


Or are you going to argue that subjecting someone to sleep deprivation isn't intentionally inflicting mental suffering?

@Alarum, surely any extreme coercion is going to make the information extracted unreliable? That is one reason why torture is outlawed.


sleep deprivation, and by that I mean sleep PREVENTION as practiced at Guantanamo and not the kind of mild sleep disturbance experienced by parents with newborn children, has been observed to produce acute neurotic and psychotic responses including advanced confusion, halucination, delusion, cognitive failure, grandiose ideation, profound distress and many of the symptoms associated with cognitive breakdown or florid schizophrenia. Although once the sleep prevention is stopped most of these acute symptoms do resolve some more vulnerable individuals have lasted psychiatric problems relating to is. This is why the APs successfully lobied the Guiness Book of Records to remove all reference to record attemnpts and start to actively discourage an attempt at it.

Now, you ask yourself whether you would trust evidence derived from someone in such a state?

No you probably should have said 'The most powerful techniques within reason to use on a minor.'

They played an excerpt of his interrogation on the BBC World Service last night and, for some reason, I was reminded of that scene in "Canadian Bacon" where the mountie torments his prisoners by writing them thank you notes.

that you copmpare Amnesty International to an agenda ridden extremist speaks volumes about your own agendas and attitudes.

Who's loss...the interrogator's or the "damaged" subject's???

I think "damage" is an interesting choice of word - it's not one that would usually be applied to a living being, would normally be used for an object.

There is no fair way to tell and even someone that knows something could be lying just to get away from torture but unless some of these things are done on people you are not going to get information from the people who really are causing problems. In no way do I advocate torture but at the same time I see it as a necessary evil

You admit that all of these side effects are caused by acute sleep deprivation but then want to trust the statement of someone who has been subjected to this?

Military intelligence would also cross-reference and analyse what information has been obtained to ascertain it's worth. Forces will not sent into action and firefights on the drop of a hat (except in the most urgent cases - information as to the whereabouts of bin Laden for example).

Once again, as I pointed out, the UN Convention on Torture does not specifically address sleep deprivation. There is a reason why I asked if a court has ruled on this specific technique- I wasn't asking for the Hazza literal interpretation, I was asking for a binding judicial ruling/interpretation (if one exists). If you keep someone from sleeping for two days you have a stronger argument than if you kept someone up for 24 hours (how many military servicemembers, doctors doing a shift at a hospital and students cramming for exams have done this?). The latter is something done all the time.

A terrorist could claim anything is "mental suffering" including being interrogated in the first place. Does he/she get to decide what constitutes "mental suffering"? No, of course not.

..but you're missing the point, inflicting mental suffering is not torture..inflicting SEVERE mental suffering is. The words are there for a reason.

Do you understand?

eh? Of course I wouldn't trust what they said. the research was gathered from a whole host of sleep deprivation experiemnets where patients were monitored by medical researchers including the world record holder Randy Gardner.


Abu Gharaib and Guantanamo seem to show most people that the Military intelligence of the US takes a similar approach to interrogation as the Spanish Inquisition with as little attention to quality of information gained.

I guess you also think the CIA are equipped to evaluate the worth of intelligence material - material like the rubbish Conan Powell presented to the UN as 'fact' when it was anything but.

yes, and the APS classifies long term sleep deprivation as SEVERE suffering which is why experimentation into it is now banned.