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Oct. 26, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

29:04

1774 Obama's War Crimes - An Interview with David Lindorff about Omar Khadr - thiscantbehappening.net

'As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.'

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	So you've written a very powerful, I think, and damning indictment of the Obama administration and perhaps even Barack Obama himself with regards to this poor fellow, this poor who was a child, this young man who was a child when he was first captured and who spent, I think, eight years in Guantanamo Bay and has recently pled guilty To a murder charge, which under the rules of the Geneva Convention and generally civilized warfare would be completely incomprehensible given that he was fighting against an army that had invaded this country.
	I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the background of this affair and how it came about that this astonishing travesty of injustice has occurred.
	Well, we have to go back to 2002 or even 2001.
	After 9-11, in less than a month, the U.S. began an invasion of Afghanistan, as you may recall, to go after the Taliban.
	And the Bush-Cheney administration initiated what they called the War on Terror.
	So they overthrew the Taliban government of Afghanistan in the course of pursuing a gang of terrorists who were in the country, theoretically as guests of the Taliban.
	That war morphed into, after the al-Qaeda basically fled from Afghanistan across the border into Pakistan and to points unknown, it morphed into a war against the Taliban, who regrouped and have been fighting back against the US, U.S., which has been escalating its troops until it's a full-scale war now.
	At the beginning, it was maybe 10,000 or 20,000 troops.
	Now it's 150,000 plus an unknown number of mercenary soldiers that we have there as private contractors.
	This kid, Omar Khadr, is actually a Canadian citizen born in Canada whose father was a confidant of the leadership of al-Qaeda, including is actually a Canadian citizen born in Canada whose father was a confidant of He subsequently was killed in Afghanistan by U.S. bombing by
	But the son was kind of drafted into al-Qaeda by the father.
	He was at the age of, I believe, 14, sent to become a fighter with the forces opposed to the United States in Afghanistan.
	And in 2002, he happened to be in a housing compound that U.S. Special Forces came on.
	They looked through the door, saw some guys with Kalashnikovs and called in an airstrike on the compound, bombed the hell out of it, and then went in to pick up the pieces.
	They found the badly wounded Cotter, who was at the time 15 years old, as well as another guy who was also badly wounded and was shot by them.
	So Cotter had a hand grenade, supposedly, according to the charges, although there's some question in terms of no real eyewitness to this.
	The military claims that he threw the hand grenade at the advancing U.S. Special Forces and killed a sergeant spear officer.
	Christopher Spear, and blinded in one eye one of the other He was critically wounded.
	He was arrested. He was brought to Bagram, the notorious prison where they have all these Taliban guys locked up and tortured.
	And he was tortured, apparently, even by military testimony.
	He was seen hanging by a chain by his wrists.
	Despite his wounds, he was threatened with rape.
	He was arrested repeatedly by American interrogators and by his prison guard captors.
	He was subjected to cold and heat and darkness and unremitting light.
	I believe some of the other things were that he had his wounds manipulated to cause pain, all kinds of really nasty stuff.
	And then he was shipped to Guantanamo, where he really grew up there from the age of 15 to now he's a 24-year-old man.
	And all this time he's maintained his innocence, except at the time he was being tortured in Bagram when they claim he confessed, but that was under torture.
	So we've reached this point where now he ended up being the first person to be put to a military tribunal under the supposedly new and fairer Standards that were established by Congress and President Obama after they realized that the, and after the courts told them that the Bush tribunals would not fly.
	And the thing people need to know In the international community is that military tribunals are, first of all, not a jury of your peers, but are a jury of ranking officers in the military.
	And second of all, that tribunals allow the admission of testimony, hearsay evidence and testimony obtained under torture, both of which are completely disallowed in a courtroom in the United States under our system of justice.
	So here he had Cotter, who was facing a military tribunal under those circumstances where his confession was going to be allowed, even though it was elicited under torture.
	And testimony, hearsay evidence against him by other people who had been subjected to torture was going to be allowed.
	And he was going to be, have his case adjudicated by a jury of seven military officers.
	And his potential penalty in this case was life in prison.
	So at the last minute his lawyer, who has all along said this is a sham and a kangaroo court and a travesty because he was 15 when he was arrested, recommended to him a The alternative,
	which would be a plea bargain that would get him out of Guantanamo after, I think, seven more months, where he would be shipped to Canada and spend seven more years in jail in Canada, in a regular prison.
	It's a pretty nasty choice, but one can see why he would have pleaded guilty.
	The government's now trumpeting this guilty plea as evidence that they were right all along.
	I mean, that's so Soviet.
	I mean, that is like straight out of the Gulag Apikalaga, that we have a confession, therefore we were right.
	Yeah, and one might say it's right out of the playbook of Saddam Hussein, too, who we overthrew because of this kind of garbage.
	It really is an atrocity, and what I think gets ignored by people is the fact that this is being done by a president who ran for office saying that he was a constitutional scholar, had taught constitutional law, and that Guantanamo was an outrage which needed to be stopped and that it was destroying America's image abroad.
	He's the commander-in-chief.
	He oversees these military tribunals.
	He's the ultimate judge on these tribunals, and he has allowed this to go on.
	Right. Now, if I understand your article correctly, there are three general layers of just cluster-fracking injustice that's going on with this kid.
	The first, of course, is that he was a child, and under the laws of war, a special treatment ought to be accorded to children, especially children who are Conscripted into a war about which they would know very little and would understand very little.
	It wasn't like this guy had CNN on all the time since he was five.
	So he's young, he's conscripted, and that's the first level.
	The second level, of course, as you mentioned, is the hearsay evidence and the admission of evidence under torture But the third, which seems to me quite odd, is it seems very strange to say that it's a jury of your peers or it's some sort of impartial judge when it is composed of officers of the army that's fighting your people.
	That doesn't seem to me to be very impartial.
	A sort of Geneva court, a third party court might be more objective, but those are sort of the three major layers.
	Is that fairly correct? Is there something that I'm missing?
	Yeah, there are even more complexities, but let me go back to the three that you've mentioned, and then I'll tell you some other ones that stink about this.
	First of all, the convention regarding the rights of the child, which the U.S. signed and is bound by law under our Constitution, it becomes a part of our criminal justice law.
	Children under the age of 18, we are required to consider, even if they're caught, captured fighting against us, they're to be considered victims, not combatants.
	That's the rule. So he should have immediately been treated as a victim of war, not as a combatant.
	As a civilian, in other words, who was caught up in the fighting?
	Yeah. I mean, in other words, a child is not considered to have the ability to understand the circumstances of the war that they're fighting in.
	They're put there under enormous duress and misinformation by people who want them to do the fighting.
	In this case, his own father.
	Right. You know, if anything, it was child abuse for his father to put him in that situation at 14 years old.
	That's ridiculous. And the man was obviously a twisted nutcase.
	But be that as it may, when these guys captured the kid, they should have immediately put him in therapy.
	And instead, they tortured him.
	So... And they were interrogating him while he was coming out from being operated on for multiple wounds, you know, while he was on drugs from being operated on.
	These guys are sick.
	And then, you know, so that's the first violation.
	And that's a war crime, you know.
	And I don't want to – you can't put too fine a point on that.
	When you violate the Geneva Conventions, you're committing a war crime.
	And a war crime is supposed to be prosecuted – I'm punished, and it's the duty of higher officers to see that that is done, and the highest officer is the commander-in-chief.
	George Bush was the commander-in-chief at the time, but Obama's the commander-in-chief now.
	The minute he took office, he should have had this kid released.
	And by the way, he's not the only child who was at Guantanamo.
	There were children as young as 11 or 12, and they actually had several camps at Guantanamo for different classes of prisoner, and they had one called Camp Iguana that was just for children.
	Camp Iguana. I mean, that sounds like a macabre parody, you know, of a summer camp.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, but these are things Americans don't know because our media don't write about them.
	But Camp Iguana was the children's camp at Guantanamo.
	It's really sick. And so, at any rate...
	That's the major problem with this case, is we're dealing with a child who never should have been arrested in the first place.
	Second of all, a lot of the problem is that the US has been, since 9-11, maintaining this weird semantic argument that the people we're fighting are not soldiers and therefore are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.
	And they use as an argument—this is incredible—they're saying, you know, they're not regular soldiers.
	They don't wear uniforms.
	Well, neither do U.S. soldiers.
	You know, our special forces go in and they go native.
	They put on, you know, the costumes of the people in the region and try to hide out when they do raids.
	You know, we always see the pictures of them in their uniforms, but that's not what they always do.
	And— There have been plenty of pictures of them in native costume in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
	So that's baloney.
	And not only that, but in the case of Qatar, they actually dropped that argument because they realized they were going to get caught up with the problem that the CIA guys that are running the predator drones and killing they actually dropped that argument because they realized they were going to get caught up with the problem that And their weapon is the predator drone, but they're the soldiers doing the killing.
	So they too are irregular by the US definition.
	Well, and of course, it's ironic and tragic to realize that when the US was in a situation a couple of hundred years ago fighting against a superior and uniformed British force, they took to the woods.
	They were the insurgents. They fought out of uniform.
	And they were heroes, of course, fighting for the freedom of their country.
	But of course, when other people do it, they're insurgents and terrorists.
	And it's so predictable, but it's still something worth noting.
	Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
	And likewise, you know, in World War II, we had American soldiers who were working with French resistance, for example, in civilian uniforms and stuff.
	All these things are silly when you know that you're just – a fighter is a fighter and they all should be entitled to the same protections or we're just completely in the law of the jungle.
	The other thing is that what they're trying to do is create this class of terrorists who's not really a soldier at all.
	Arguably, you could make the case that the al-Qaeda guys are a gang, a criminal gang, and that they would not be entitled to...
	The protections of POW status.
	I can see that case being made legally with some kind of moral basis.
	But that's not what the Taliban are.
	And it's also not right to say that guys like Qatar...
	Assuming he were an adult, if he's fighting with the Taliban, which is what was happening, he's no longer a terrorist.
	He's simply an ally in country.
	I mean, he's a Canadian.
	He's not an Afghani.
	But he is an ally, if he were an adult, he's an ally of the Taliban and is fighting with them.
	We have those people all the time.
	I mean, there are...
	The United States is fighting in Afghanistan on behalf of The Afghan government, at least theoretically, that's what our government claims.
	Never mind that that government's a puppet.
	The same thing was true in Iraq.
	You know, after we supposedly handed over sovereignty in 2004, the army that was fighting the insurgents in Iraq was the Iraqi army, and our army was there by invitation.
	We then become foreigners fighting for Iraq.
	And in that same sense, Qatar, as it were an adult, would be a soldier from another country fighting.
	The French Foreign Legion does this.
	The coalition of the willing would be the same category, right?
	Exactly.
	So so to argue that he is somehow a terrorist while the people he's fighting with are maybe soldiers and entitled to POW status is really to find a distinction.
	Right.
	Right.
	And I think you've made the case elsewhere, if I remember rightly, that the whole mess is a war crime.
	I mean, as far as I understand it, I mean, the U.S. did not make the case that bin Laden was behind 9-11.
	I mean, I know a lot of people believe it, and it may be true, but they didn't make the case.
	They just invaded the country without proof.
	They didn't ask for extradition.
	They didn't ask... You know, it's worse than that, because what happened was the story of the U.S. and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden is that before the U.S. actually attacked Afghanistan, the Taliban government offered to turn bin Laden over as long as the U.S. would guarantee that he would get a fair trial.
	And the US wouldn't guarantee that.
	Bush told them that he wasn't interested.
	After we invaded, they said they would hand him over anyway.
	And Bush said he wasn't interested.
	So all of this nonsense about pursuing bin Laden with our invasion of Afghanistan is a complete crock because the Taliban was ready to sell him out and give him to us to avoid being invaded.
	Yeah, and it just reminds me of the end of the Second World War, when the American government said that the condition of surrender was the removal of the emperor.
	The Japanese government agreed to that, and then they nuked them anyway.
	America has a pretty puritanical and savage streak.
	Not to say it's the only country that does, but it's something...
	American exceptionalism is often put forward to hold up the position that there's a moral difference between America's shining city on the hill and the rest of countries.
	When they're in a bloodthirsty mood or when America's in a bloodthirsty mood, it seems to act the same as any other imperialistic power, which is to puff itself up morally while performing the worst kinds of atrocities under the table.
	That's absolutely right.
	And your account of the end of World War II is absolutely right.
	Before we dropped either bomb, the Japanese were already suing for peace.
	They had talked to the Swiss embassy, they talked to the Russians, and the Americans knew about it and wanted to drop the bomb.
	Both bombs. Now, I want to respect your time, but I was wondering if you could just spend a few minutes talking about Why you think this is occurring?
	Is the bloodlust for this deluded perspective of vengeance still so strong in the US almost a decade after the attacks that this is considered to be a just punishment?
	Is there so little empathy for a child caught up in this global conflict of which he knew virtually nothing?
	Why do you think this is being allowed to continue?
	Why is the president not intervening or any other senior members of the military?
	Well, let me tell you a little bit about America.
	Your accent makes it clear you're not an American.
	Indeed. This is a country that loves to take kids who commit crimes, little kids, six-year-old kids, and based on what the crime is, usually when it's murder, we like to have them declared adults for purposes of trial.
	So we've got kids.
	There was just a case recently of a kid who was, I forget how old he was, but it was a single digit, who was tried as an adult in Florida and given a life sentence for the killing of another kid, which by all accounts could have been an accident.
	But in any case, how do you try a nine-year-old kid as an adult?
	It just makes a mockery of any concept of justice whatsoever.
	And that's not uncommon.
	I mean, in my own state of Pennsylvania, it was done to a kid who was, I think, 12 years old who shot an older brother with a rifle because he was angry at him and was tried as an adult.
	And he's now, I think, facing life.
	Wow. So given that that's what we do in this country, I mean, there was...
	To your own kids, let alone foreigners, let alone people you're at war with.
	This is just kids down the street.
	Yeah, no, there was a 15-year-old girl in Ohio.
	I met the victim's A grandson.
	This 15-year-old girl brutally murdered a grandmother, an older woman, who had said something to her that she found offensive.
	And the girl obviously had anger management issues.
	But it turned out that she was...
	life since infancy being sexually abused by the men in her mother's life and was truly damaged goods.
	She was sentenced, tried as an adult at 15 and sentenced to death.
	I'm sorry, it's Indiana.
	And the only reason she's not dead now, she got close to execution, but the grandson of the woman who was murdered decided sort of midway through her incarceration and time on death row that his but the grandson of the woman who was murdered decided sort of midway through her incarceration and time on death row that And so he started going to see her and realized her humanity.
	He paid to have – he personally paid to have her get therapy and he mounted a campaign that reached the pope to get the governor to commute the girl's sentence.
	And I believe it was this year that she was finally released on good behavior and is now devoting her life to going around with this guy talking against the death penalty.
	But this is another case of the mentality in America of how we look at kids who commit crimes.
	So given all of this, I don't see a lot of interest in America, empathy in America for the fate of a 15-year-old boy who kills an American soldier in America.
	Even though it's in battle.
	And even though what he did, if an American young guy had done it, it would have been a silver star.
	- Exactly, and of course-- - Our guys come at you when you're already badly wounded and you throw a grenade knowing that probably the next thing that's gonna happen is a bullet to the head as an amazingly heroic act actually. - Even if we assume that it happened, which I would be very, very skeptical about, I mean, reports from the military with self-interest on the battlefield with no witnesses and no objective facts, I just assume it's a fairy tale.
	Yeah, I imagine it's made up, and he says it never happened until he made this plea bargain.
	So there is no corroborating witness to the statement of these military guys who had it in for this kid.
	Yeah. And by the way, you know, the other thing is that there's plenty of testimony that U.S. soldiers are double-clicking, they call it, they even have a term for it, the soldiers, double-clicking wounded fighters when they walk into a scene.
	So, you know, this kid had every reason to think these and probably truly what they were doing.
	That these soldiers were walking into the compound and just popping off every guy they came on that was wounded by the bombing.
	Yeah, a Canadian soldier just got charged, I think, just got convicted of that as well.
	So that is very commonplace, I think, over there.
	Yeah, so, you know, nobody's watching.
	And so, you know, throwing a grenade is also, it would be an act of self-defense, desperate self-defense.
	And for a president who was so focused on improving the image of America around the world, I can't imagine, I guess I can imagine, The hate that is being made by Muslim media or Islamic media with regards to this incredibly tragic and abusive situation.
	I mean, the image of America overseas when they're focusing on the sympathies, the sympathies are naturally and I think humanely directed towards this kid.
	I mean, they must just be making an enormous amount of statements overseas in foreign press.
	Well, especially in the Muslim world, I mean, this is really outrageous and does huge damage, not only to America's image, but it probably will contribute to more American guys dying overseas because of the passions that will be inflamed here.
	The one thing that I'm puzzled at I maybe mistakenly had this notion of Canada as being somehow saner and humane than its neighbor to the south, and yet Canadians have not rallied behind this kid, perhaps because of the same kind of prejudice against Muslims.
	I don't know. I think that is a perspective that Canada has around the world.
	I think that you may want to ask native Canadians how they feel about the benevolence of the Canadian government or Canadian school children who are facing some just atrocious schooling up here.
	In my mind, the system as a whole is pretty messed up and needs to be examined from the ground up.
	I personally don't think there's a good government around the world.
	I think we need to look at alternatives to I think there are violent oligarchical hierarchies in terms of trying to solve complex social problems.
	But I think that there is a perception of that because we tend not to have as aggressive a foreign policy as the United States does.
	So from the outside it looks much more peaceful, but from the inside there are many similarities.
	And I think what the Canadian government is doing, or rather not doing, and what the Canadian public is not doing, It's pretty telling.
	There is, of course, a lot of social pressure to hate the enemy.
	I mean, Canada, of course, has merely advisors in Iraq, but is fully committed to Afghanistan.
	And, of course, soldiers are dying over there.
	And there is this weird social standard that says, Showing any compassion or humanity for the, quote, enemy is a betrayal of the people who are in uniform.
	And I think that's just completely mad.
	What we're trying to do, I think, the people who are working for peace in the world, we're trying to avoid the cycle, and the cycle can only be broken through compassion.
	What we're doing right now with this atrocity, of course, as you know, is we're building the next wave of violence that is going to come in from the Muslim world, to which everybody will then throw up their hands and say, it's incomprehensible.
	Why would they hate us? It must be because we're so good.
	Which only adds gasoline to the fire.
	So sorry for my rant. This is supposed to be your interview, but that's my perspective.
	No, but you're absolutely right.
	Of course, who's killed more Canadian soldiers, the Taliban or American soldiers?
	I don't have those statistics off the top of my head, but I'm sure if it's not even, America's slightly ahead.
	And we killed a bunch of your guys, didn't we?
	Yeah, absolutely. And some in training exercise, just bombed.
	Yeah, yeah, no, right.
	There was some outrageous error that I remember where the U.S. killed a whole bunch of Canadian guys.
	Why do we hate you?
	I don't know.
	Right, right. Anyway, listen, I really do appreciate it.
	I'm going to post a link to the article.
	I really wanted to highlight it because there is this sort of syrupy, gooey, good press about Obama's pacifism and nobility and so on.
	But he, to me, just seems like a very well-groomed Roman general.
	There is blood at the base of the pedestal that nobody wants to look down and see, and I thought that your article really brought that into focus.
	I really thank you for taking the time to write it, and thank you for taking the time to chat with this show.
	Thanks for having me on. And please let me tell people that the site is thiscantbehappening.net.
	I will link to that as well.
	And I would also, if at some point you'd like to come back on and talk more about children's rights in the U.S., that is something that I'm very, very interested in.
	So please let me know if you have any more time after all of your massive deadlines have passed.
	Anytime. Thanks, man.

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