Khadr interrogation videos to be released

Praxius

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http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/07/14/khadr-video.html

The curtain will be drawn back this week on the normally top-secret operations of Canada's biggest spy agency, as lawyers for Omar Khadr, the 21-year-old Toronto-born man detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are expected to release video footage of his interrogation there by agents of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Four formerly classified DVDs, to be released Tuesday, show CSIS questioning Khadr, then a teenager, at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where he has spent the past six years.

The footage was filmed during seven hours of interrogations by a lone CSIS agent over three days in February 2003.

The videos show Khadr being asked what he knows of al-Qaeda operatives and about his Islamic faith. At several moments, Khadr, who was raised in a fundamentalist Islamic milieu that included his father's al-Qaeda acquaintances, breaks down and begins crying.

The release of the videos by Khadr's defence lawyers will be a source of potential embarrassment for CSIS and the Canadian government.

CSIS and the Foreign Affairs Ministry were granted special permission by the U.S. Defence Department to question Khadr after he was brought to Guantanamo Bay following his capture in Afghanistan. But the resulting video footage shot by U.S. government agents was never intended for public viewing.

The DVDs are being made public under a court order obtained by Khadr's lawyers. In May, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that branches of the Canadian government had to hand over key evidence against Khadr to his legal team to allow a full defence of the charges against him, which include accusations by the U.S. that he spied for and provided material support to terrorists.

Several Canadian media organizations then applied for and obtained the release of the DVDs, as well as a package of documents that made headlines last week.
 

Praxius

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Update:


Video images show the Toronto-born Omar Khadr in the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The black dot obscures the face of his interrogator.

'You don't care about me,' Khadr sobs in interview tapes
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/07/15/khadr-tapes.html

A teenage Omar Khadr sobs uncontrollably as Canadian spy agents question him at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a brief video excerpt released via the internet early Tuesday morning.

The 10-minute video posted just after 5 a.m. ET is of poor quality and the voices are often inaudible, as it was never intended to be viewed by the public. But it shows the Toronto-born Khadr, 16 at the time, being interviewed by Canadian Security Intelligence Service officials in late February 2003.

The excerpt is from five formerly classified DVDs consisting of 7½ hours of questioning that took place six months after Khadr was captured following a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan.

The tapes, made public under a court order obtained by Khadr's lawyers, offer a rare glimpse of interrogations of Guantanamo detainees and of Khadr.

Khadr, now 21, has been held at the military prison for the past six years.

The U.S. Defence Department granted special permission to CSIS and Canada's Foreign Affairs Ministry to question Khadr after he was brought to Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held on charges he killed a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan.
Shows interrogator wounds

At one point during one of the interviews, Khadr raises his orange shirt to show wounds on his back and stomach that he says he sustained during the firefight.

"I'm not a doctor, but I think you're getting good medical care," the interrogator responds. As with all the agents in the video, his face is blacked out to protect his identity.

Khadr cries, "I lost my eyes. I lost my feet. Everything!" in reference to how the firefight in Afghanistan affected his vision.

"No, you still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your legs, you know," a man says.

Between gasping sobs, Khadr tells the agent several times, "You don't care about me."

As Khadr continues crying, the agent calls for a break.

"Look, I want to take a few minutes. I want you to get yourself together. Relax a bit. Have a bite to eat and we'll start again," the interrogator says.
Khadr chants in haunting voice

Then Khadr begins sobbing with his head in both his hands, chanting over and over again in a haunting voice. His words are difficult to hear, but he seems to be saying repeatedly, "Kill me."

In the next interview excerpt, Khadr sits on a blue couch looking down as he is questioned. He mumbles short answers and declines an offer of food.

The interrogator asks him a string of innocuous questions to try to warm him up.

"I want to stay in Cuba with you. Can you help me with that?" he says, commenting on how nice the weather is in the country.

He later asks, "What other interesting things do you want to tell me about?"
Khadr's response cannot be heard.
'Cry of a desperate young man'

Khadr's mother, Maha Elsamnah, emotional after watching her son's interrogation, expressed a deep sense of loss for her family and uncertainty over what she should do.

In a brief interview with CBC News on Tuesday morning, Elsamnah — who lives in Toronto — said she feels the need to protect the five children still with her.

Her husband, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an avowed al-Qaeda sympathizer before he was killed in fighting with Pakistani military forces in 2003. Elsamnah refused to say more without speaking to her lawyer.

Khadr's defence lawyers have repeatedly called for their client to be returned to Canada, arguing he was a child soldier and was tortured to extract confessions, and they hope Tuesday's release of the videos will spark public support for their efforts.

"We Canadians stand for compassion, we stand for the rule of law. And what you are seeing there is the abuse of the rule of law as Canadian courts have indicated about Canadians and Canada's involvement in Guantanamo Bay," lawyer Dennis Edney told CBC News.

Edney said Canadian officials should have asked Khadr about potential torture, but instead went into the interview without any help for the then teenage boy.

"We don't do that in Canada and that shouldn't have happened to this young, most vulnerable boy in Guantanamo," the lawyer said.

He also said Khadr suffers from several injuries, including the loss of sight in one eye and difficulty with the other, as well as shrapnel and bullet wounds.

Referring to Khadr's sobbing chants, Edney said, "It's the cry of a desperate young man. He expected the Canadian officials to take him home."
Rae defends Liberal inaction

Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae questioned why Canada is the only remaining Western country with a citizen at Guantanamo Bay.

"I think that Omar Khadr should be brought home, and whatever justice there is to be faced, he should face it here," Rae told CBC News from Charlottetown early Tuesday.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to call for Khadr's return, instead saying that Canada will leave due process in U.S. hands. The Conservative government has also maintained it is following a Liberal precedent by not intervening.

Rae defended the Liberals, saying what's important is to focus on the latest revelations and act accordingly.

"I think the question is what we do now?… And the answer is we bring him home," said Rae.

Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS agent, told CBC News that the unprecedented release of the interrogation tapes is likely to put a damper on Canada's relationship with the U.S. — at least in the short term.

"Anybody can logically sort of assume that the Americans will be a little bit more cautious about what they give to us or in the context they give it to us, the Canadian authorities," he said Monday.

In May, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that branches of the Canadian government had to hand over key evidence against Khadr to his legal team to allow a full defence of the charges against him, which include accusations by the U.S. that he spied for and provided material support to terrorists.

Several Canadian media organizations then applied for and obtained the release of the DVDs, as well as a package of documents that made headlines last week.

Disc copies of the five DVDs were to be made available to the media at 1 p.m. ET at the lawyers' offices in Edmonton.

The DVDs come nearly a week after internal foreign affairs documents were released showing that Canadian officials knew Khadr had been sleep-deprived for weeks to make him more willing to talk during interrogations.

The report says that Canadian official Jim Gould learned during a visit to Guantanamo on March 30, 2004, that Khadr had been put on a "frequent flyer program," meaning he was not permitted to remain in any one location for more than three hours.

Watch Video:
http://watch.ctv.ca/news/latest/khadr-tapes/#clip66636
 

Colpy

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Nov 5, 2005
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I fail to be impressed.

I do agree with Bob Rae that it is time to bring him home........the Yanks have completely screwed up his detention, interogation, and trial. Now we need to get him out.

But the "frequent flyer" is not torture.

Waterboarding is torture, but there is no evidence he was subjected to that.

The battle is still on in Afghanistan, so the USA is perfectly within its rights to hold him......as a POW, not a criminal.

And he was a child soldier.

He should have been left to the tender mercies of the Afghans, or returned to Canada, or held as a POW.

To try someone for murder for firing on your troops immediately after you have bombed the hell out of him is more than a little ridiculous.

CSIS certainly did not mishandle him in any way, according to these reports.

Bring'em home, tolerate the inevitable celebration and hero's welcome offered by the brain-dead, watch him for the foreseeable future.
 

wallyj

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May 7, 2006
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Wow,that was brutal,they made him cry and everything. Well,he cried on his own,but he was bullied. Well,maybe not. It looks like he was treated pretty damn good. These excerpts have ben released by HIS lawyers. 7 hours of tape and this was the worst that they could come up with!! Only the cbc,who want to embarass Harper,and the far left wingnuts(truthers),will see anything wrong with this interrogation. I have no sympathy for the POS or his family that has made a career out of living off canadian taxpayers in between stints at attempting to kill our troops. The attached pic is from RAWA,an organization that tries to help women in Afghanistan. Warning,it is a little graphic.
 

Lineman

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Feb 27, 2006
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I reluctantly have to agree with Colpy, bring him home to mommy and put up with more media manipulation for a while till he becomes page 6 news. We shouldn't forget that with the support of the whole family he followed his father to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban and/or Al Quaeda. Their sympathies lie not with us but with them.
 

Praxius

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Dec 18, 2007
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I reluctantly have to agree with Colpy, bring him home to mommy and put up with more media manipulation for a while till he becomes page 6 news. We shouldn't forget that with the support of the whole family he followed his father to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban and/or Al Quaeda. Their sympathies lie not with us but with them.

Yes, he followed him to Afghanistan, like a child of a Muslim Extremist has any say in anything that his father wants him to do..... yes..... he's got more freedom to chose what he wanted to do then most rich white snob kids driving their own cars and talking on their cells that their parents buy them to show their love.... that makes perfect sense. :roll:

I already know what freedoms of decision I had as a kid growing up as a Roman Catholic, and that wasn't a lot.... what my Dad wanted me to do, I did. I can just imagine how much more freedom a child being raised by a Muslim Extremist would have over me..... frig, that's gotta take the cake today for the most ignorant statement I've read.

Plus the fact that you're basing your opinion on information from the US who've already labeled him guilty before anything even started, who've already have been proven to have rewritten the battle reports to exclude the other guy they killed who could have tossed the grenade..... not to mention they shot Omar in the back while he tried to hide in the corner of the compound they found him in, like any typical young teenager would in the middle of a battle..... but suddenly the report changed to say he was the only one alive to toss the grenade and they shot him shortly after the toss..... even though the bullet wounds show the entry was from the back and other US troops who were there claimed there was another guy alive after the grenade was tossed.

Guess what? That's called Reasonable Doubt.... there's also this little thing we like to call "Innocent until proven guilty" ~ And since the US already claims he's guilty just for the fact that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, which doesn't suprise me, since Afghanistan is well know during battles that Taliban will take up civilian compounds and hide behind civilians.... for all we know they could have taken over the compound where he was and then the US troops considdered him an enemy as well just because he was there.

And that's what has been happening and still happening over there when it comes to the US. They'll attack an entire village, or air strike the whole place to rubble because some taliban moved into the village in which they were supposed to be protecting in the first place.... then they claim the civilians are just collateral and shouldn't have been helping the Taliban in the first place..... even though the reason why they knew the taliban were there in the first place, was because the village told them and wanted help.... not to be obliterated off the face of the earth.

And much like the other cases both in Afghanistan and Iraq, with US troops covering their mistakes up by planting weapons and tools on civilians they killed and calling innocent people terrorists or insurgents, I sure as hell don't trust the credibility of the US's argument against Omar.

The only way to truly get to the bottom of this, is to bring him back to Canada so he can face a fair and just trial, where the judge, Prosecutor, Defence, Jury and Executioners are not all from the US whom already view him as guilty.

If he's guilty, he's guilty.... if not, then he's not.... but there is no way in hell, he's going to get any fair trial or judgement while he remains down there.
 

Praxius

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Related Update:

Mother breaks family's silence on Khadr tapes
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/07/16/khadrs-mom.html

Omar Khadr's mother made a desperate plea for her son's return after viewing videotapes from 2003 that show her son weeping uncontrollably and begging for his mother.

The videotapes show Canadian intelligence officers questioning Khadr over several days in February 2003 and were released Tuesday, providing his mother and the world with the first glimpse of Khadr in six years.

Khadr was captured and sent to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, following a deadly firefight with soldiers in Afghanistan. He has been detained at the prison ever since on charges of killing a U.S. soldier.

After hours of silence following the Tuesday release of the interrogation tapes of Khadr, Maha Elsamnah, who lives in Toronto with her other children, agreed to speak to the media.

"Just help this child for safety or get him some assistance. It doesn't matter political, humanitarian, any kind of assistance," she pleaded later Tuesday.

Elsamnah said she would "scream at everybody and say please do something" to help any child in Khadr's situation.

"I wish anybody out there can do anything to help Omar, or to help any child in need. Any child anywhere," she said.

Referring to talks that Khadr should undergo rehabilitation if he's returned to Canada, his mother said she fully supports the idea.

"Omar will need somebody to reassure him that he still deserves to live."

In an interview with the Canadian Press, Elsamnah also described the agony of hearing her son call out to her on the videotapes.

At one point, Khadr begins sobbing with his face in both his hands, chanting something over and over again. While it was first taken for "Kill me" or "Help me," Elsamnah says he was really saying the Arabic phrase for "My mother," which is "Ya ummi."

"My son is calling for me and I'm sitting here," said Elsamnah.

"I cried. I said, 'O God, please answer his call. I can't answer.' I wish I can tell him. What can I do? I'm here. I wish he can hear me answering back."
No plans to return Khadr to Canada: PMO

Despite the mother's pleas and the release of the tapes, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office reiterated Tuesday that the Canadian government would not seek Khadr's return to Canada on humanitarian grounds, as human rights groups and opposition politicians have also been demanding.

The tapes were made public under a court order obtained by Khadr's lawyers.

Khadr, now 21, is the only Western foreigner still being held at the naval prison. He is scheduled to go on trial before a U.S. military commission in the fall.

His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was reported to be a vocal supporter and financier for al-Qaeda and later died fighting Pakistani forces in the fall of 2003.
 

Praxius

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Related Update:



Omar Khadr video polarizes Canadian opinion
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080715/khadr_dvds_080716/20080716?hub=Canada

TORONTO -- Omar Khadr's interrogation video appeared to polarize the Canadian public Tuesday as images his lawyers hoped would stir compassion and push Ottawa into repatriating him from Guantanamo Bay prompted reaction ranging from sympathy to outright contempt.

It's a sign, experts said, of the tension between the Khadr family's reputation as an al Qaeda family and public support for the rule of due judicial process - something even the U.S. Supreme Court has found lacking in Guantanamo.

That later sentiment was shared by many who posted their opinions on media websites, including one person who wrote: "I am Canadian and I demand that his rights be vigorously enforced. YO! HARPER! Snap to it!"

Another opined: "It makes me sick that people like Robert Pickton, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka have way more rights than this poor boy who was just a kid and did what he was told."

"Omar should be set free."

For every statement of support, however, there were damning words of condemnation aimed at both Khadr and his family.

The late family patriarch, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an associate of Osama bin Laden; the family spent time living in at least one of his compounds. His mother, who now lives in Toronto with Omar Khadr's siblings, has publicly assailed Canada's moral values.

"This kid is a terrorist, plain and simple, and he comes from a terrorist 'al Qaeda' family," read one posting.

Another wrote: "He's a Canadian of convenience... every single (member of the Khadr family) are not real Canadians."

At the Khadr family's home, his sister Zaynab described the vitriol as misplaced.

"People have been blinded with rage, but I think they're putting it in the wrong place," she said.

"I'm not saying my brother is guilty and I'm not saying he's innocent. I'm saying that what's happening is not right - to an enemy or a friend."

Khadr, 21, is accused by the U.S. of throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002. He faces trial before an American military commission in October.

The video, taken some six months after his capture at the age of 15, was released by his lawyers Tuesday as part of their ongoing campaign to have Khadr returned to Canada.

"We're hoping that the Canadian public will recognize that if you put aside any concerns or guilt or innocence... and look at the compassion we feel, that children have a special significance in society," said lawyer Denis Edney.

The Khadr family is held in contempt by many Canadians, but the country's sense of judicial fairness has tempered the anger with sympathy for the prisoner's plight, said University of Toronto law professor Ed Morgan.

"Statements from the Khadr family, all along, have been horrendous. No one would sympathize with what the Khadr family has said," Morgan said.

"The problem here is that the Guantanamo procedures are so roundly criticized, including by the U.S. Supreme Court, that it's hard to be anything but a little sympathetic for people who are confronting what looks like a lack of due process."

The polarized public reaction to the video came as little surprise to Delta Media's Bernie Gauthier, a public relations guru based in Ottawa.

While the footage clearly shows a frustrated teen under stress who lacks the gruff voice one might expect of a soldier, the orange prison jumpsuit and security camera footage might also feed into the public's image of criminality, Gauthier said.

"What we have in our own minds, our own bias and our own judgment that we have, will shape how we interpret the video," he said.

"(Do) we pay more attention to the pleading child and the body language of someone who is frustrated and hurt, or is it the orange jumpsuit and the camera angle that sort of confirms for us what we think about him already?"

Given the strong emotional response from the public to the video, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae cautioned that Khadr's fate should not be subject to a "popularity contest."

"He was brainwashed and sent in to fight NATO troops. I think we all recognize that's deeply troubling to Canadians," said Rae.

"We have our troops there, obviously it's deeply troubling to all of us. The issue is not that. The issue is, isn't it appropriate for Canada to take responsibility for Mr. Khadr?"
 

Praxius

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Additional Information not talked about in other articles: (Quotes and Details from Videos)

Khadr on tape: Shifty, sullen, scared
http://www.thechronicleherald.ca/Canada/1067753.html

Sitting in his prison-orange shirt under the harsh lights of a Guantanamo Bay bunker, sullen and self-pitying Omar Khadr is by turns the shifty grinning truant teenager and the forlorn victim of a borderless war on terror.

"You didn’t just fall off the turnip truck," his Canadian interrogator tells him as Khadr sits on a couch, drinking a Coke.

"Right now, Omar, it doesn’t get any worse."

Tapes of the February 2003 interrogation of the Toronto-born Khadr by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service were released Tuesday after a court order to aid his defence on a charge he murdered U.S soldier Christopher Speer during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002.

The tapes, grainy with poor sound quality, deliver a rare glimpse into the interrogation tactics by Canada’s spy agency.

The camera is hidden behind an air vent, leaving the frame slashed by horizontal slats. His interrogator’s face, for security reasons, is covered by a superimposed black ball, leaving the impression Khadr is being hectored by the petroglyphic stickman off a crosswalk sign.

"Finally," Khadr smiles on the first day when he learns he is talking to fellow Canucks.

"I’ve been requesting the Canadian government the whole time."

It had been a long, harsh road to Guantanamo and the CSIS interview.

Government documents, recently unsealed by the courts, reveal that for weeks prior to interrogations, his jailers at the U.S. base in Cuba would soften him up by moving him from cell to cell every three hours on a "frequent flyer" program to deprive him of sleep, making him punchy and more susceptible to questions.

Khadr, now 21, was 15 in July 2002 when he was captured in a firefight with U.S. forces rooting out terrorist strongholds in an Afghanistan village near the Pakistani border.

Sgt. Speer, a 28-year-old medic and father of two from Albuquerque, N.M., was hit by a grenade blast and grievously wounded.

Less than two weeks later at a hospital in Germany, they pulled the plug. Khadr was shot twice through the torso in the exchange, shrapnel also grievously damaging his left eye.

He was soon airlifted to Guantanamo Bay and six months later was interviewed while, all around him, the drumbeats of America’s renewed war on terror were beating louder and louder.

Just days earlier, then-U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell made his case to the United Nations why it was time to go after Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. Around the world, protesters demanded a halt to the pending invasion.

On the Al Jazeera network, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden called for Muslims to continue the fight against America.

It was al-Qaida and bin Laden whom CSIS investigators wanted to know more about from Khadr. His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was then a vocal supporter and financier for al-Qaida and later died fighting Pakistani forces in the fall of 2003.

No, says Khadr, eating potato chips, picking off crumbs from his shirt and licking his lips, Dad didn’t fund terrorist training camps.

"So everybody’s perceptions of what your father was doing is all kind of a big mistake, is it?" asks the interrogator.

Yes, he nods.

Did Omar go to training camps?

Yes.

For what.

"Self-defence."

Chip. Smack. Finger lick.

"I’m very happy to see you," smiles Khadr as Day 1 wraps up.

The next day the bonhomie falls off a cliff.

On the tape, Khadr remains behind the desk but now is sullen, morose, unco-operative, crying.

"You don’t care about me!" he blurts out, his face down, covered by his hand.
"Nobody cares about me."

He pulls his orange shirt over his head and points to his left shoulder.
"I can’t move my arms."

"I requested medical help a long time ago. They wouldn’t do anything about it."

The interrogator is unfazed.

"I’m not a doctor but I think you’re getting good medical care."

"I lost my eyes, I lost my feet, everything!" he shouts back.

"No, you still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your legs, y’know."

They leave him alone to compose himself. Instead he sits in the room, head in his hands, fingers clawing at his hair and forehead, sobbing and crying for his mother in Arabic.

By Day 3 he has shifted to a couch, but the mood is improving.

The interrogator softly, forcefully, pushes forward on the father.

"You know what your father wants. Your father wants to continue this struggle. But he’s doing this at the expense of his entire family."

"He’s not doing anything bad," says Khadr.

"Well, we think he is."

On the last day, Khadr is relaxed, back on the couch, eating a reheated burger, sipping a Coke, his arms stretched out on the top of the couch.

He fences with the interrogator, shrugging and smiling as they discuss what he may know about terrorist operations.

Yes, he says, he lied to the Americans and, yes, he has lied to the interrogator. But he had to.

"I said that because I’m scared."

Of what.

"Of torture."

He didn’t kill Speer, he says, but instead was sitting down when he was ambushed by three soldiers: "They just came over and shot me,"

"How did that American end up getting so dead then?"

"There was a fight on."

From there it was over.

"This is our last kick at the cat," says the interrogator.

Help us out or we’re outta here.

"You just want to hear whatever you want to hear," says Khadr.

How is he doing in Guantanamo? Getting along? Making friends?

No, says Khadr, head hung again.

"There’s nobody to help me here."
 

Praxius

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Update:

Canadians 'stabbed in the back' by stance on Khadr
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNe...0716/child_soldier_080716/20080716?hub=Canada

Liberal senator and ex-general Romeo Dallaire says the government is undermining efforts to eradicate the use of child soldiers, by refusing to bring Omar Khadr into the Canadian justice system.

Khadr, accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, is being held in Guantanamo Bay. Footage has been released of Khadr, at the age of 16, being questioned by a CSIS agent as he sobs and asks for his mother.

Dallaire said Khadr is a child soldier and should be given the same rehabilitation and treatment that Canada has devoted to other child soldiers around the world.

"We're getting stabbed in the back," Dallaire told CTV Newsnet on Wednesday. "We have worked for years to assist other nations in eradicating the use of children in conflict. But our own country doesn't even want to recognize that our own citizen (is a child soldier). No matter what his politics are, it's totally irrelevant. He's a child soldier that was abused and he's a child soldier that needs to be brought back into a formal process we signed up for."

Canada has signed on to UN Security Council resolution SCR 1612, which calls for the monitoring of countries that use child soldiers. It's estimated more than 250,000 child soldiers are used around the world, many of them in African countries like Sudan, the Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The resolution also urges countries like Canada to support programs aimed at rehabilitating child soldiers.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a UN document signed in 2002, makes the use of child soldiers illegal under international law. A child soldier is defined as anyone under the age of 18 who directly or indirectly takes part in a military or political armed conflict.

Dallaire said the interrogation video released Tuesday shows a "traumatized 16-year-old" who is being held in an "illegal jail," and is an argument why Canada should use its own justice system to try Khadr.

"It is all the reason why we have fought for establishing the optional protocol on child rights, so that children are not used in combat operations," said Dallaire.

He added there was a "disconnect between what we believe are human rights, the rights of children and our judicial system, and this position taken by the prime minister in regards to a process that is considered by the American supreme court as inappropriate."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson have not publicly commented on Khadr's detainment since the interrogation video was released Tuesday.

However, Harper said last week that Khadr should be tried in Guantanamo Bay.

"Mr. Khadr is accused of very serious things," he said. "There is a legal process in the United States. He can make his arguments in that process."

Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade during a 2002 firefight that killed U.S. Sgt. Chris Speer. Another soldier involved in the skirmish, Sgt. Layne Morris, said Khadr deserves no sympathy.

"(Khadr) is disappointed and discouraged that he's alive and he's in the hands of coalition forces instead of in paradise with 72 virgins," Morris told The Canadian Press, when told of footage showing Khadr weeping.

He also said Khadr should be tried in Guantanamo Bay because he "committed adult crimes" against U.S. citizens.

Morris has alleged that Khadr waited until troops were nearby before throwing a grenade, in order to kill as many people as possible.

None of the charges against Khadr have been proven in court.

"(Khadr) is disappointed and discouraged that he's alive and he's in the hands of coalition forces instead of in paradise with 72 virgins," Morris told The Canadian Press, when told of footage showing Khadr weeping.

^ Yes like this idiot knows what's going on in his head.... and yeah... that's why he's crying for his mother... more unfounded dribble from the US to suit their ignorant and predijuce goals.

Oh he commited adult crimes, so should be dealt with as an adult and shouldn't have any sympathy?

Fokking idiot... that's why there is the classification as a "Child Soldier" which I have been preaching about for months, if not years now since this all occured.... and now finally some officials are starting to see it this way too.

I love it when you hear from someone so isolated in their own country and greatness that they have no understanding of what international laws are for.

OOoooo... he apparenlty threw a grenade that killed a US soldier, so they want to string him up and make an example out of him, regardless of his age or if he really did it..... Oh.... and outside of US borders and into another country where the US has no legal authority in the first place.... yet they can charge, torture and detain the kid for as long as they please, anyway they please, for their own sick demented games of revenge and trying to make an unjust example out of him.

And they label him a terrorist, thereby he get's no rights to defend himself fairly in the first place.... rather then a child soldier, because that legal system doesn't work for their agenda.

Makes me sick.

What's even more sick is Harper not doing a damn thing for a Canadian Citizen. It's already very clear that the trial is screwed, he will not face a fair trial, it is known that he was tortured (As sleep deprevation is considdered a form of torture by the UN, as which Canada signed onto) Harper has no proper position to not stand there and do nothing for him.

FFS people, Robert Pickton had more rights protecting him.... and he killed more then just one person..... Omar might have killed one person.... if they can prove he did it, which their evidence isn't strong enough to prove in the first place..... which is why they want to throw him through this corrupt system in the first place so that their faulty and edited evidence can work.

Pathetic.