Hamdan's lawyer says advisor is exerting illegal sway for political ends

In a motion to dismiss the case against Bin Laden's ex-driver, he says his Navy superior is pursuing election-year convictions when he is supposed to be impartial.


MIAMI -- The lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, on Thursday accused U.S. officials of trying to orchestrate war-crimes convictions for election-year political gain.

In his motion for dismissal of the case against Hamdan, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer accused Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann -- legal advisor to the White House official overseeing terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- of exercising "unlawful command influence" over both the prosecution and defense. Lawyers participating in the tribunals are members of the U.S. military, and all are subordinate in rank to Hartmann.

More than a dozen suspected senior Al Qaeda figures are among the 280 prisoners currently at Guantanamo, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

In his 97-page motion, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer cited what he said were inappropriate comments and actions by Hartmann and political appointees in the Guantanamo process -- including its top official, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority.

Hartmann "has so closely aligned himself with the prosecutorial function that he cannot continue to provide the requisite impartial advice to the convening authority," Mizer said.

Hartmann did not return messages seeking comment. But a spokesman for the tribunals, Army Maj. Robert D. Gifford, said the general had not seen the motion and would have nothing to say immediately about its allegations.

"While the Office of Military Commissions receives notice of court filings, we are not aware if such a motion has even been filed with the trial court," Gifford said. "Regardless, the proper place for the resolution of any legal matter is in the courtroom."

In the last six years, only one case against a detainee at Guantanamo Bay has reached its conclusion. Crawford, who served as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was Defense secretary, in early 2007 facilitated the plea bargain that freed Australian David Hicks.

The move was seen by many as a favor by the Bush administration to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose failure to free Hicks was hampering his reelection battle -- which he eventually lost.

The former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, quit in October after complaining that Hartmann was bringing political pressure to bear on the legal process.

The motion filed Thursday said that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II had effectively ordered Davis to ensure that the terrorism suspects all were found guilty. "We can't hold these men for six years and have acquittals. We have to have convictions," Haynes is quoted as saying when Davis mentioned that some defendants at the World War II Nuremberg trials were acquitted.

Hartmann took over as legal advisor in July and immediately began acting as "de facto chief prosecutor," Mizer wrote in his motion.

Amid grimness and beatings, a sense of change

The sprawling prison complex at Guantánamo Bay looks from a distance like many of the hastily built resorts round the Caribbean, the camps occupying a narrow strip of sand by the palm-lined sea-shore, with fencing to keep the locals out.

But through the military checkpoint, the grimness of the world's most infamous prison becomes apparent: barbed wire and watchtowers and heavy nylon matting hiding it from outside eyes.

Once inside it becomes grimmer still. Prisoners at Camp Six, where there are maximum security cells, are isolated for 22 hours a day, allowed into a small courtyard for two hours to exercise. Confrontations with guards and beatings are commonplace. Many have been tortured, if not at the camp, then before they arrived. About 10 are on hunger strike. Two have been force-fed for more than 800 days.

At Camp Six military guards, working in strict rotation, peer through peepholes at least once a minute. A prisoner, briefly glimpsed, is bedraggled, only a tiny glimmer of curiosity in his eyes at a break in the routine brought about by the presence of a handful of journalists.

A senior US medical officer at the camps, who preferred not to be named, admitted that about 10% to 15% of the prisoners were receiving treatment for medical or psychological problems, but insisted this was comparable to prisons on the US mainland.

Reporters are not allowed to speak to prisoners but lawyers can, and they regard conditions at Guantánamo as much worse than anywhere else in the US prison system. One of the lawyers, Wells Dixon, from the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, said he had been going to the camps for years and had seen a marked deterioration in prisoners' health. "Camp Six was set up to destroy them physically and mentally, and it worked," he said.

Almost seven years since the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan and five years since the occupation of Iraq, there are still 275 detainees at Guantánamo (down from a high of 775), held without trial. They have come from a wide arc stretching from North Africa through the Middle East to the Muslim regions of western China.

Rear Admiral Mark Buzby, commander in charge of the Guantánamo camps, inside the US naval base on the eastern end of Cuba, said in an interview that his conscience was clear. "I have to get up every morning and look in the mirror and believe that I am doing something that is morally and legally correct. And believe me I can do that every single morning."

Buzby claimed that many of the inmates, if not detained, "would be very actively engaged in jihad and would be doing their very best to take American and coalition lives. And the reason I know this is because they are very happy to tell us that every single day."

Lawyers questioned whether it was possible to hold a fair trial, given that some of the evidence that might be used against the prisoners had been obtained by torture. Buzby said it would be for the judge to decide whether the evidence was admissible. In contrast with the torture used in secret CIA detention centres round the world, Buzby said his preference was for interrogators building a rapport with detainees and offering incentives. "We use the Subway sandwich and the Big Mac." Asked whether he regarded waterboarding - which simulates drowning and was used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-declared mastermind of 9/11 - as torture, he admitted: "I would certainly not want it done to me."

The prisoners react in various ways to indefinite confinement. Some are compliant, and these are mainly held in Camp Four, where they are free to wander round a small compound and chat to other inmates, can attend classes in English and have access to a library, in which one of the most read books, according to the librarian, is the latest Harry Potter in English.

Confrontation common
But confrontation is never far away. One of the guards at Camp Six, Patrick Zintel, told of how the prisoners retaliate. "They pile faeces by the door and when a guard comes in, they will throw it at them," he said. Such incidents are common enough for the US to put an eye-wash dispenser outside the cells.

Another guard, Chris Cookson, said that such incidents also occurred in the camps where the inmates are supposedly compliant. "I came out of an office and a cocktail of water, urine and faeces came out of nowhere and splattered the person in front," he said.

The guards retaliate heavily. Clive Stafford Smith, the London-based lawyer for some of the inmates and author of Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side, which recounts the experiences of the prisoners, said he had seen the scars from such beatings. "Sadly, the emergency reaction force [a five-strong team of guards] still responds to minor infringements by beating them up."

There is a sense of uncertainty about Guantánamo. Although the Bush administration promised that the first of the trials at Guantánamo will finally begin this year, guards and lawyers are unsure how much longer the camps will exist. All the leading candidates in the US presidential race -the two Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the Republican John McCain - have promised to close Guantánamo on entering the White House on January 20 next year.

Stafford Smith predicted that Guantánamo will close rapidly and welcomed the prospect because the prisoners are likely to be moved to the US mainland where they will be subject to US law.

Defence lawyers divide the detainees into three categories. The first are those like Mohammed who could go on trial. Buzby said he expected about 80 to go on trial. Of the remainder, 80 have already been cleared for release but cannot find a country that will take them. The others are awaiting clearance.

Uncertainty
The defence department said earlier this month that Mohammed, who is held at Camp Seven, a CIA camp whose existence was only revealed this year, and five others are to be tried on charges that carry the death penalty.

Yet another camp has been built for Mohammed's trial. Camp Justice, begun in September and completed at the start of this month, consists of a windowless courthouse, holding cells and tents for 550 officials, lawyers and journalists.

Shayana Kadidal, another lawyer with the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has more clients at Guantánamo than anyone else, said he thought the trial would be nowhere near completion by the time Bush leaves office. Reflecting the sense that these are the dying days of Guantánamo, the air force engineers who built Camp Justice said it could be dismantled in a month.

Omar Khadr: A most peculiar young offender

He should be dealt with here in Canada, as a juvenile who was involved in terrorism

The civilized world condemns the recruitment of child soldiers. Yet Canada sits quietly by as one of its citizens, Omar Khadr, is prosecuted by the United States for war crimes he allegedly committed at age 15 as a member of al-Qaeda.

It is impossible to square. Al-Qaeda's recruitment of child soldiers is immoral and abusive; consequently, it is immoral and abusive to prosecute as a war criminal a child recruited by al-Qaeda, and punish him accordingly. We can't have it both ways.

Lately, it has dawned on Canadians that the United States may well have lied about its evidence against Mr. Khadr. Far from having proof that only he could have thrown the grenade that killed their soldier, the U.S. appears to have hidden the truth: that the teenage Canadian was in the company of an adult al-Qaeda fighter and was himself unarmed, on his knees and facing away from battle when a U.S. soldier shot him twice — in the back.

But the falsehoods are only part of the reasons why Canadians let the 15-year-old disappear six years ago into the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in which he had no access to a lawyer for the first 27 months and no way to contest his detention. Canadians accepted that Mr. Khadr be held fully responsible for his actions. As if he were an adult.

The irony has never really penetrated Canadians' consciousness. Canada, the country of the liberal Youth Criminal Justice Act, is the only Western nation to give the United States carte blanche with one of its nationals at Guantanamo. Britain, Australia, Sweden and Germany fought to repatriate their nationals — adults, all of them. And Canada let a juvenile languish.

The reply from our government is but a single, vapid refrain: "Let the process work." But this is a process that, even apart from its other flaws, aims at punishing Omar Khadr for the accident of his birth in an al-Qaeda family.

A VICTIM OF HIS OWN HOME

When a young person raised in a terrorist family becomes a terrorist at 15, does he join voluntarily? Can he give free and informed consent? To say yes is to let al-Qaeda and Toronto's Khadr family off the hook for grooming children for terrorism. It puts the onus on the children to resist.

Most Canadian children grow up in circles within circles of benign, positive influences — family, school, neighbourhood, the larger culture. Omar's circles of influence were pro-terror. His late father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was a senior financier with al-Qaeda who prodded Abdurahman, Omar's elder brother, to become a suicide bomber. Even his mother and sister boasted on national television of the glories of terrorism.

From age 11, Omar was inculcated in terror, according to the U.S. charge sheets. "From 1996 to 2001, the Khadr family travelled throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, including yearly trips to Usama bin Laden's compound in Jalalabad for the Eid celebration at the end of Ramadan. While travelling with his father, Omar Khadr saw or personally met senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Usama bin Laden, Doctor Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef (aka Abu Hafs al Masri), and Saif al Adel. Khadr also visited various al Qaeda training camps and guest houses."

Only an extraordinary 15-year-old could have withstood that grooming process. The Khadr son who did resist, Abdurahman, did not do so until he was in his 20s. A younger brother, Abdul Karim, was paralyzed in battle in Pakistan in 2004 at 14. (His father was killed in the same battle.) The oldest brother, Abdullah, faces extradition from Toronto to the United States on terrorism charges from Afghanistan.

Yet many Canadians insist he acted of his free will. "Real child soldiers are forcibly taken from their parents (who are often killed)," one Globe reader wrote in an unpublished letter to the editor. "These children are drugged, brainwashed, and abused so they become killers. Khadr became a soldier/terrorist because his family encouraged it. He was a willing participant. Where was the coercion?"

This is a narrow view of coercion. Could there be a worse form of coercion than that in a father's wish that his son become a suicide bomber? "Blow yourself up or lose your father's esteem." Omar's family culture promoted dying for the cause. That was what it meant to be a good boy in that family.

CHILD SOLDIERS ELSEWHERE

The world is rife with child soldiers. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., estimates that as many as 300,000 child soldiers are in combat around the world. Yet none of today's international war-crimes tribunals prosecute child soldiers or terrorists.

No one under 18 has been charged before the tribunals for Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. No one has been charged in East Timor, in Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "To date, there is no precedent in history for the prosecution of a child soldier before an international criminal tribunal, and similarly there is no precedent in the Western world for prosecution of a child soldier before any state tribunal," says Sarah Paoletti, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, in a friend-of-the-court brief to the military commission that is to try Mr. Khadr. (Among those whose names are on that brief are former Canadian justice ministers Irwin Cotler and Allan Rock.) The U.S. says there are in fact precedents, but its examples predate the Nuremberg Tribunals. For instance, a British Military Court in northwestern Germany convicted and jailed a 15-year-old Hitler Youth member for his role in killing a British serviceman.

More recently, at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2004, the U.S. prosecutor, David Crane, was given the option of putting on trial, in a court without punishment, those age 15 to 17 who committed war crimes. Memorably, Mr. Crane rejected that idea. "The children of Sierra Leone have suffered enough both as victims and perpetrators. I want to prosecute the people who forced thousands of children to commit unspeakable crimes."

If international practice is clear, the law as written is less so.

The relevant text is the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. Both Canada and the U.S. are among the 150 signatories. "The Protocol prohibits the United States from using child soldiers, not from prosecuting them," says the U.S. brief to the military commission.

It's right. The protocol is silent on its face. Emboldened by that silence, the U.S. stretches the point: "If anything, the Protocol obligates the United States to prosecute Khadr" because not punishing Mr. Khadr would "further incentivize" al-Qaeda in recruiting young people.

If the U.S. is right, where is the outcry that all the world's child soldiers are going unpunished at all the world's tribunals except this one?

Omar Khadr was a war crime waiting to happen. Anyone in al-Qaeda or the Taliban is an unlawful enemy combatant under U.S. law. Anything such a combatant does to fight, even in battle, is a war crime.

"In a normal war," explained John Bellinger, a legal adviser to the U.S. state department, "where both sides have a right to engage in combat with one another, if a soldier kills a soldier on the other side, it's not murder unless it is done somehow contrary to the laws of war perfidiously, or killing someone when they have already surrendered.

"In this case, though, the members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while they may have thought they were defending themselves, they had no legal right under the laws of war to be engaging in combat." There's a legitimate expectation that young people know and abide by the criminal law of their countries; the minimum age of criminal responsibility is usually 12 (as it is in Canada). But how could a 15-year-old of Mr. Khadr's experience and background have been aware of the laws of war, especially laws that hadn't been invented yet?

And speaking of inventions: "According to the reports of the action we have available, the last surviving enemy in that compound … as his last act at the firefight rose up with a pistol and hand grenade, and engaged the coalition forces, threw the grenade," Col. Roger King, a U.S. spokesman based in Afghanistan, told the Associated Press in September, 2002. We now know that the U.S. had an eyewitness report that painted a very different picture.

A CASE FOR CANADIAN PROCESSES

And what has Canada done to help Mr. Khadr? It sent intelligence officers to interrogate him without counsel, and passed summaries of the interrogations to the Americans. Some help. (The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing Mr. Khadr's request next week for access to Canada's files from those visits.)

"The recruitment and use of child soldiers is one of the most flagrant violations of international norms," says Mr. Singer. Why? Because children are not to be made a mere instrument of the state or terror group. Because children are manipulable. Because children cannot assess risk as adults can. To prosecute children as if they were fully responsible for war crimes is to legitimize their recruitment.

As other Western countries have repatriated adult suspected terrorists — several, in Britain's case — it seems strange that Canada would not bring a lone 21-year-old home to face fair processes that would take into account his age and background, and his long incarceration at Guantanamo. Omar Khadr, child soldier, has been dehumanized enough. Bring him home.

Trial on CIA Rendition Resumes in Italy

ROME - The trial of 26 Americans charged with kidnapping a terror suspect during an alleged CIA operation resumed Wednesday in Italy, despite a pending ruling by the country's highest court on a government challenge that could scuttle the case.

Hearings reopened in Milan after Judge Oscar Magi ruled the trial should continue, even though the Constitutional Court is still debating a request by the Italian government to throw out the indictments against the Americans, who are being tried in absentia.

Alessia Sorgato, a lawyer for several American defendants, said the judge had ordered the resumption of the proceedings to "guarantee a reasonable length of the trial."

"The judge made a very clear reasoning," she said in a telephone interview. Shortly after it opened in June, the trial was suspended pending the Constitutional Court ruling, and Magi had already extended the suspension.

Wednesday's hearing was largely devoted to technicalities, Sorgato said during a break.

She said a hearing at the Constitutional Court on the government challenge is scheduled for July 8, but that a decision is expected much later.

The suspects in the case- all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents - are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, in an operation coordinated by the CIA and Italian intelligence.

Italian prosecutors say Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was transferred to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being moved to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years. Nasr, who was released last year, said he was tortured.

Seven Italians also were indicted in the case, including Nicolo Pollari, the former chief of military intelligence. Pollari has denied any involvement by Italian intelligence in the abduction.

The Constitutional Court must rule on whether the kidnapping trial will be permitted to publicly air details of the U.S. extraordinary rendition program, which involved moving terrorism suspects from country to country without public legal proceedings.

In its challenge, the Italian government contends the prosecution unlawfully relied on state secrets to justify the charges. The high court also plans to hear a challenge charging that prosecutors went too far by wiretapping Italian intelligence agents indicted in the case.

The 26 Americans have left Italy, and a senior U.S. official has said they would not be turned over for prosecution, even if Rome requests it.

The Italian government has not responded to prosecutors' requests to seek the extradition of the Americans, and the Justice Ministry has indicated the Constitutional Court's ruling would be a key factor.

Canada's high court takes Gitmo case

OTTAWA -- (AP) -- Canada's Supreme Court ruled Thursday it will hear arguments about whether classified Canadian documents about a Canadian detainee at Guantánamo Bay should be released.

Lawyers for Omar Khadr, charged with killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, will argue next week that the government should release details about meetings Canadian foreign affairs officials and members of Canada's spy agency had with Khadr in 2002 and 2003.

Khadr was interviewed by foreign affairs officials and members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and at least some of the results of the interviews were passed to American authorities.

Khadr's lawyers have obtained censored summaries of the material but are seeking more documents, including additional intelligence material and correspondence between Canadian and U.S. officials. They say Khadr has a constitutional right to the information to defend himself against the American charges.

Khadr is expected to be among the first detainees to face a U.S. war-crimes trial since the World War II era.

Khadr says he was mistreated by his U.S. captors and coerced into making self-incriminating statements after the 2002 firefight in Afghanistan that led to the charges against him.

''The Canadian government went to Guantánamo Bay in 2002 and 2003 and interrogated Omar Khadr absent all international legal rights,'' said Dennis Edney, Khadr's lawyer.

``They then shared that information with the Americans, but they refused to provide that same information to us, his defense counsel, to assist Omar in making a full answer in defense to the charges he's facing.''

Edney claims the Canadian interviews at Guantánamo violated Canada's bill of rights -- a contention that raises the wider legal issue of whether the bill can be applied in a foreign jurisdiction.

Canada's Supreme Court has ruled in the past that, as a general rule, Canadian officials overseas need only follow the laws of the host country. But there is a major exception to that rule -- if the foreign practices are at odds with international human rights law.

That prompted Khadr's legal team to argue that the Guantánamo detention conditions, as well as the special military tribunal preparing to try him for murder, don't measure up to accepted norms.

They cite violations of juvenile justice rules set out by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, noting that Khadr was 15 when he was captured. They also point to international agreements on civil and political rights and the treatment of prisoners.

Canada's Justice Department, in its brief to the court, dismissed the efforts by Khadr's lawyers as a ``fishing expedition in relation to the most sensitive of government-held information.''

Khadr was sent to the prison camps in Cuba in October 2002, after his 16th birthday.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on military commissions charges that include murder as a war crime, conspiracy and providing material support forterrorism.

The military says it plans to charge about 80 detainees at Guantánamo, but so far none of the cases has gone to trial.

Military judge rules for driver's defense

For a third time, a military judge has authorized lawyers for Osama bin Laden's driver to send questions to alleged al Qaeda kingpins in segregation at Guantánamo.

The ruling by Navy Capt. Keith Allred rejected national security arguments raised by Pentagon prosecutors. The military judge also sounded dismissive of a government argument that the driver could have conspired in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks without knowing about the suicide plot.

Specifically, Allred authorized the lawyers to ask reputed mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed whether the driver was a part of the 9/11 suicide plot and other al Qaeda attacks.

'The issue of whether the accused was `merely a driver,' or knew the unlawful purpose and was actively engaged in the unlawful work of al Qaeda seems to be very much at issue,'' Allred wrote in the four-page ruling, dated Friday.

The Pentagon made it public on Wednesday, intact, with no portions blacked out. Earlier judges' rulings have been censored.

It was the latest setback to Pentagon prosecution efforts to limit the discovery phase before the separate military trials of the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, and Canadian captive Omar Khadr. Both are slated to face military commissions this summer.

Pentagon prosecutors had three times resisted the judge's plan to let Hamdan's lawyers ask questions of seven former CIA captives. They have been at Guantánamo since September 2006 and are now held as ''Task Force Platinum'' prisoners,at a segregated site set up secretly by the military, called Camp 7.

Under the scheme, devised by Allred, defense lawyers submit questions for Mohammed and the others to an independent security officer who works for the judge, not the prosecution.

The judge limited the substance to the time before Hamdan's capture in November 2001 in Afghanistan, and before the men were held and interrogated secretly by the CIA overseas -- meaning they cannot divulge U.S. interrogation techniques.

The security officer will have the questions translated, as well as the answers -- and then black out any responses that don't cover that time period.

Allred said in his ruling that national security could be safeguarded by the special security review.

Even before the Pentagon made the ruling public, defense lawyers had on Tuesday already submitted written questions for four of the men, chief among them the man known in CIA circles as KSM, Mohammed.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, Hamdan's Pentagon appointed defense counsel, called Allred's ruling ``a real rebuke of the government's dragnet theory of conspiracy as well as granting us access to these detainees.''

The questions for Mohammed specifically ask, ''What was Hamdan's involvement in Sept. 11,'' said Mizer.

Based on their research, he said, the answer should be, ``nothing.''

Hamdan, 36, is accused of being a driver and sometime bodyguard for Bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks in Afghanistan. He is broadly charged as a co-conspirator in the terror plot and other al Qaeda attacks. Conviction carries life in prison.

Hamdan has admitted that he worked for bin Laden, and earned $200 a month as a driver. But he says he never joined al Qaeda and did not plot any attacks.

Allred wrote: ``It is not unfair to permit the Defense to seek to show that while he may have been a bodyguard and driver, he knew little or nothing about the inner workings of this conspiracy, or that was not a party to it, if they can.''

The Pentagon has yet to release the prosecutor's brief opposing access.

But Allred seemed to hint at government concerns in fashioning the question-and-answer format. If the security officer detects one captive trying to send a message to another ''colleague or a confederate,'' the judge wrote, the security officer can delete the answer, or summarize it.

Last week, an Army judge in the Khadr case also ruled five times for the defense on discovery issues.

In one instance, Army Col. Peter Brownback ordered the Pentagon to let defense attorneys take a deposition from the battalion commander at Khadr's July 2002 capture in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors had argued that Khadr's lawyers should only be allowed to question the officer at the trial. He has been identified in court only as ``Lt. Col. W.''

One issue is why ''Lt. Col. W'' rewrote a portion of a battlefield account of Khadr's capture, two months after the fact, which could help convict him.

In the case of access to the so-called high-value detainees, Allred had agreed to the defense request in early February at a hearing at Guantánamo.

Then, the prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. Will Britt, objected in court -- and told the judge that military commission guidelines forbid him from ruling wholesale on the question of access. Rather, Britt told the judge, he needed to consider access piecemeal, on a case-by-case basis.

Allred then issued a written ruling in mid February, laying out the terms of access and ordering the government to establish an independent Security Officer who does not work for the prosecution.

The prosecution immediately filed for reconsideration.

It was not immediately clear Wednesday whether the prosecution would be appealing Allred's latest decision.

Gitmo captive: I was threatened with rape

WASHINGTON -- In a fresh document from the Guantánamo war court files, Canadian captive Omar Khadr alleges that he was repeatedly threatened with rape as an interrogation technique in Afghanistan and at U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

The partially censored nine-page affidavit, signed by Khadr on Feb. 22, covers old ground already investigated, including allegations of abuse at Guantánamo that emerged in 2005, prompting a Navy criminal investigation.

But the document includes never-before revealed allegations, such as the rape threats and a partially censored description of regaining consciousness after his capture to discover he was being interrogated in an American field hospital in Afghanistan. He was 15.

Once released from medical care to the Bagram detention center, he said, ``I was interrogated many, many times. For about the first two weeks to a month that I was there I would be brought into the interrogation room on a stretcher.''

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, repeated the Pentagon's long-held conviction that Guantánamo captives are treated humanely and that any credible allegations of mistreatment are investigated and dealt with in keeping with military standards.

"In this case, we have no evidence to substantiate these claims," he wrote in an e-mail. He also noted that all approved interrogation techniques are published in the Army Field Manual on Interrogations and that an al Qaeda training manual "teaches its operatives to make false claims of abuse."

The details are emerging in the military trial case of Khadr, now 21, accused of the grenade killing of a U.S. Army commando in a July 2002 firefight. The document was admitted to court last week as part of the pretrial arguments over access to potential witnesses for Khadr's upcoming summertime trial before U.S. military officers, called a military commission.

Meantime, the Canadian's Pentagon lawyers have been searching for interrogators and other witnesses to his capture, in which he was shot twice in the back in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound. They also want witnesses to the interrogations in Afghanistan and later in Guantánamo.

The lawyers are seeking to punch holes in the prosecution case alleging that Khadr, as an al Qaeda conspirator since age 10, was the only enemy combatant who could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., in a firefight near Khost, Afghanistan.

Speer died of his wounds days later at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Last week, the defense revealed at a pretrial hearing that the brigade commander at the firefight wrote two accounts, with the same date.

In the first account, a brigade commander identified to the public as ''Lt. Col. W'' wrote that the grenade thrower was killed on the spot. In the second, according to Navy Cmdr. William Kuebler, written two months later, Lt. Col. W said only that the enemy was ''engaged,'' leaving open the possibility that he had survived.

Khadr was the only survivor.

The documents are under seal at the Office of Military Commission along with the other defense motions from last week's case.

Now, the affidavit, a 63-item statement by the Canadian who grew up between Toronto, South Asia and U.S. detention, offers Khadr's most comprehensive account of his alleged treatment -- an English document crafted with his lawyers, which does not name his guards and interrogators, at least in the portion not blacked out by military censors.

For example, after his capture and regaining consciousness, he said, he was guarded by ``a young blond soldier who was about 25 and a Mexican or Puerto Rican soldier.''

The document is riddled with threats of rape wielded by the United States and its allies.

''On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,'' he alleges in Item 23. By Item 55, he has been transferred to Guantánamo, and he is taken to interrogation with an Afghan man, who ''told me that I would be sent to Afghanistan and raped.'' In Item 56, he says, an interrogator pulled his hair, spit in his face and threatened to bring in an Egyptian ``to rape me.''

The document also revisits old allegations -- such as his description on arriving in Guantánamo, at age 16, and hearing someone in the military say, ``Welcome to Israel.''

Or his claim, investigated by the military, that in March 2003 guards splashed his prison camp uniform with Pine Sol and dragged him around an interrogation booth, like a human mop, because he had urinated on himself during a bout of shackled isolation.

Pentagon and Guantánamo spokesmen did not reply Tuesday to queries on what that investigation found or whether anyone was disciplined.

The current prison camps spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, in February declined to address allegations emerging at the military commissions, saying, ``It is likely best for all of us to hear what the attorneys have to say during the hearings.''

Lawyer: Mistrust of Jews a Gitmo Ploy

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Lawyers for four Kuwaiti men held at Guantanamo Bay have asked a court to block U.S. military prosecutors from contacting the detainees without their consent, accusing the government March 17 of violating legal ethics.

Matthew MacLean, a Washington-based attorney for the Kuwaitis, said his clients and U.S. federal courts have recognized him and a colleague as legal representatives - and alleged that government interrogators have told his clients their lawyers are Jewish in a bid to sow mistrust.

"Are these prosecutors bound by the rules that are binding on all prosecutors everywhere?" MacLean said. "Or are these prosecutors going to be allowed to be cowboys, doing whatever they want?"

The case goes to the heart of complaints by many detainees' lawyers, who say the challenges in accessing their clients on sporadic visits to the isolated U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba make it more difficult to establish their trust.


MacLean's emergency petition, filed in a Washington appeals court, raises concerns over a recent assertion by Guantanamo's chief prosecutor that he does not need the lawyers' permission because they do not represent the detainees before the war-crimes tribunal system.

The chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo tribunals, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, said in an e-mail that was sent to MacLean on Feb. 26 and submitted with the court filing that the government "certainly" can have contact with the Kuwaitis regardless of the attorneys' representation.

The legal adviser to the tribunal system, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, said prosecutors have followed professional rules of responsibility. He added that the government is "working to clarify the distinction" between trial counsel and attorneys who represent detainees in other matters such as lawsuits over their confinement.

The petition is one of the first cases before the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, which the Pentagon created last year to hear appeals from the tribunal system. On March 17, the court ordered the government to file a response by week's end, MacLean said.

President Bush said during a trip to the Middle East in January that two of the last four Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo will be charged, but he did not say which and prosecutors have not revealed further details. Eight other Kuwaiti detainees have been sent home.

The U.S. military plans to charge about 80 of the roughly 275 men held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to the Taliban or al-Qaida. Fourteen detainees have been selected for prosecution, but so far none of the cases has gone to trial.