The children of Guantanamo Bay
The US base at Guantanamo Bay is under renewed scrutiny after lawyers in London claimed that dozens of minors were being held there. The lawyers say that at least sixty of the inmates were under the age of eighteen at the time of their capture.
They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized - including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.
The disclosures threaten to plunge the Bush administration into a fresh row with Britain, its closest ally in the war on terror, only days after the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, repeated his demands for the closure of the detention facility. It was, he said, a "symbol of injustice".
Whitehall sources said the new allegations, from the London-based legal rights group Reprieve, directly contradicted the Bush administration's assurances to the UK that no juveniles had been held there. "We would take a very, very dim view if it transpires that there were actually minors there," said an official.
One child prisoner, Mohamed el Gharani, is accused of involvement in a 1998 al-Qa'ida plot in London led by the alleged al-Qa'ida leader in Europe, Abu Qatada. But he was 12 years old at the time and living with his parents in Saudi Arabia.After being arrested in Karachi in October 2001, aged 14, he has spent several years in solitary confinement as an alleged al-Qa'ida-trained fighter.
One Canadian-born boy, Omar Khadr, was 15 when arrested in 2002 and has also been kept in solitary confinement. The son of a known al-Qa'ida commander, he is accused of killing a US soldier with a grenade in July 2002 and was placed top of the Bush administration's list of detainees facing prosecution.
"It would surely be really quite stupid to allow the world to think you have teenagers in orange jumpsuits and shackles, spending 23 hours a day locked up in a cage," a source added. "If it's true that young people have been held there, their cases should be dealt with as a priority."
The British government have always said that they have been assured that any children held in Guantanamo would be held in a separate part of the camp, known as Camp Iguana, but the US admits that only three children have ever been held there.
Clive Stafford Smith, a legal director of Reprieve and lawyer for a number of detainees, said it broke every widely accepted legal convention on human rights to put children in the same prison as adults - including US law."There is nothing wrong with trying minors for crimes, if they have committed crimes. The problem is when you either hold minors without trial in shocking conditions, or try them before a military commission that, in the words of a prosecutor who refused to take part, is rigged," he said. "Even if these kids were involved in fighting - and Omar is the only one who the military pretends was - then there is a UN convention against the use of child soldiers. There is a general recognition in the civilised world that children should be treated differently from adults."
A senior Pentagon spokesman, Lt Commander Jeffrey Gordon, insisted that no-one under the age of eighteen was currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. This is a slightly disingenuous answer as any fourteen year old held in 2001 would have passed the eighteen year old threshold by now. Nor was Jeffrey Gordon remotely apologetic, insisting that:
"There is no international standard concerning the age of an individual who engages in combat operations... Age is not a determining factor in detention [of those] engaged in armed conflict against our forces or in support to those fighting against us."
Every time you think the reputation of the US can't sink any lower under this administration, they manage to sink further and to engage in behaviour that is jaw dropping in it's stupidity.
They should start printing al Qaeda's recruiting posters for them, as they're already supplying the material that such posters will highlight.
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