Khadr trial will be a window into America's war on terror

[unhappycamper]

Khadr trial will be a window into America's war on terror
By Carol Rosenberg | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Saturday, August 7, 2010

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — Across his eight years in U.S. custody, Americans have seen Canadian Omar Khadr grow from a child found near dead in a war zone in Afghanistan to a brooding, weeping teenager and more recently a defiant young man spurning a guilty plea deal at Guantanamo.

They've seen him cast as, alternately, a child of jihad who hurled a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier in battle in Afghanistan in 2002 or a 15-year-old captured far from his native Toronto and then tortured into confessing to a crime he now denies.

Prosecutors say Khadr, now 23, was an "unprivileged enemy belligerent'' when he joined elders on a night mission in Afghanistan, planting mines. They call it a war crime.

Defense lawyers see a "child soldier'' whose father introduced him to al Qaida at age 10 and deserved the protections of an innocent offered up to war.

While his coming trial must tackle those competing tales, the first full war crimes prosecution of the Obama administration may reveal much more: