Youngest detainee pleads guilty, gets 8 years

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Guantanamo’s youngest and last Western detainee, pleaded guilty Monday to committing war crimes under a plea deal meant to send him home to Canada next year.

Khadr’s full admission is spelled out in a 50-paragraph statement that admits he was a murderer, al-Qaida conspirator and spy in Afghanistan in July 2002 when he was 15.

Khadr, now 24, pleaded guilty to five charges including murder for throwing a grenade that mortally wounded a U.S. soldier during a raid on an al-Qaida compound in Afghanistan in July 2002. He also admitted to planting improvised explosive devices and receiving weapons training from the terrorist network.

To authenticate it, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, the military judge, spent less than an hour questioning Khadr, who replied only “yes” and “no” to questions - mostly in a whisper.

Khadr, who had previously pleaded innocent and rejected a plea agreement, said he understood the charges against him and nobody had made any promises to him so that he would plead guilty.

He wore a dark suit and tie and hunched intently over the plea agreement that would return him to Canada in a year to serve seven more years in prison there.

Captured near dead in a firefight in Afghanistan, he has grown to a bearded, strapping 6-foot-plus man behind the razor wire at Camp Delta.

In the agreement, according to two legal sources with direct knowledge, Khadr says he eagerly took part in a July 28, 2002, firefight with U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan that mortally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M.

Speer’s widow, Tabitha, wore a black dress to court and sat weeping when the part about her husband’s death was mentioned.

Sources say that, in the plea, Khadr also says that he had aspired as a teen to kill Americans and Jews and described his father, Ahmed Said, as a part of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle, a trusted confidant and fundraiser.

Parrish said the full text would be released today.

“Omar Khadr is not a victim. He’s not a child soldier,” said Navy Capt. John Murphy, the Pentagon’s chief military commissions prosecutor. “He’s convicted on his own words.”

Khadr’s 9 a.m. EDT plea spared him a risk of life in prison, had he been convicted at trial.

NO PLEDGE FROM CANADA

Under a deal sealed through an exchange of diplomatic notes Saturday, the United States will support a plan to transfer him to Canada at age 25 to serve the last seven years of an eight-year sentence.

Khadr’s Canadian lawyer cast his young client as a victim. “He had to come to a hellish decision,” said Dennis Edney, “and he had to make it on his own to get out of Guantanamo Bay.”

Earlier, his lawyers had said they hoped to secure an agreement because he faced a possible life sentence under a military tribunal system that they believe favors the prosecution despite changes adopted under President Barack Obama.

“There’s not much choice,” Edney said. “He either pleads guilty to avoid trial, or he goes to trial, and the trial is an unfair process.”

Canada’s government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not pledged to receive Khadr even if Washington invokes the prisoner transfer treaty between the United States and Canada. Unclear was how the Pentagon would release him in a year, under the agreement, if Canada refused to imprison him for the next seven.

“We’ve put him on a track to freedom in the prime of his life,” lamented former Utah National Guard Sgt. Layne Morris, left blinded in one eye at age 40 by the firefight that captured Khadr.

Were Khadr to serve all eight years, he would be 32 on his release. “That’s a whole lot of life left to do a whole lot of damage,” said Morris.

The plea seeks to set to rest one of the most divisive cases to bedevil the 8-yearold prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.

Khadr, born in Torontoto immigrant parents, was apprenticed to al-Qaida as a boy and jailed as a teen in Guantanamo Bay among reportedly hardened American-hating ideologues and jihadists.

A Guantanamo video showed him weeping in interrogation. A U.S. medic testified he saw the boy shackled, sobbing in the notorious Bagram, Afghanistan, detention center, which an interrogator described on a witness stand as “one of the worst places on earth.”

Critics of his prosecution said he deserved the protections of a child soldier, not prosecution as a terrorist. But his victim was a soldier. Prosecutors said they spared him a death-penalty case because of his youth.

Beginning today, his jury of seven senior military officers picked for a trial will hear both victim testimony and mitigating evidence in his case to decide a formal, for-the-record sentence. They include a Marine colonel with a Purple Heart from a firefight in 2003 in Iraq and were being airlifted to Guantanamo Navy base Monday morning.

Only if the panel members return a shorter sentence than eight years would the jury’s punishment matter.

PLEA BARGAIN

Parrish did not read aloud the part of the plea deal signed with a senior Pentagon official, which capped his sentence but said only one year would be served at Guantanamo.

But Parrish said that document would be released once the jury had deliberated its sentence.

The war-crimes trial, the first under Obama, began in August but was put on hold when Khadr’s defense lawyer fell ill and collapsed in the courtroom.

The Khadr case has long angered critics of Guantanamo, including some Obama supporters, who say Khadr should not be prosecuted because he was just 15 at the time of the battle in Afghanistan and was subjected to harsh treatment in custody.

Defenders say he was a child soldier pushed into militancy by his father, an associate of bin Laden who was killed in Pakistan after his son’s capture. And they say that killing a soldier during a firefight does not amount to a war crime.

“It’s particularly galling that a president who promised to restore human rights is beginning the first trial here with a child soldier who was abused for years in U.S. custody and was taken to a war zone by his dad,” said Jennifer Turner, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who is at the U.S. base in Cuba to observe the proceedings.

The U.S. Supreme Court forced Congress and President George W. Bush to modify the rules, and Obama did it again as part of his so far-unsuccessful attempt to empty the detention center. The military tribunals have convicted just four other men, none of them major al-Qaida figures.

Three of the five Guantanamo convictions - from among nearly 800 prisoners incarcerated since January 2002 - have been achieved through plea bargains. Australian David Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner and ninth grade dropout, was freed in his homeland in less than nine months under a 2007 plea deal in which he admitted providing material support to al-Qaida, and Sudanese captive Ibrahim al-Qosi, an al-Qaida cook, is serving a reported two-year sentence.

Salim Hamdan, a driver for bin Laden in Afghanistan until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, was the first Guantanamo prisoner placed on trial in 2008. He was sentenced to just six months more than the time he had already served.

The only trial resulting in lengthy punishment was that of Sudanese militant Ali Hamza al-Bahluh, a committed warrior who made propaganda videos for al-Qaida. He declined to defend himself in his 2008 trial and is serving a life sentence.

Information for this article was contributed by Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, by Ben Fox of The Associated Press and by Carol J. Williams of the Los Angeles Times.