How can a 15 year old boy be tried as a war criminal, while the war criminals in the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq and in the war on terror are left free to roam, with the blood of one million Arabs and Muslims on their hands? The primary cause for this is that the Arabs and Muslims have become complacent, and no one cares for them or fears them. No matter how much they may deny this, the Arabs and Muslims are the only people in the world today who are killed, and then their murderers get away with it, and sometimes are even rewarded for it (George W. Bush receives hundreds of thousands of dollars to give speeches written by others, since he can hardly speak, while Tony Blair is a war profiteer, and holds too many positions for the day's 24 hours to accommodate). I hope that the reader will remain patient with me, as I shall showcase two scenes from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; the portrait that I am trying to draw cannot be complete without them both. The boy Omar Khadr is being tried before a United States military commission as a war criminal, making him the first child to be tried on this count since the end of the Second World War, and making the trial the first of its kind since Obama entered the White House. The charge is that this child killed an American soldier in a battle, and was thus supposed to be treated as a prisoner of war. However, the Military Commissions Act of 2009 stipulated that if a U.S soldier dies at the hands of a non-uniformed combatant, the perpetrator is treated as an “unprivileged enemy belligerent”. The trial was adjourned for at least one month, after the defense lawyer Lt. Col. Ron Jackson became ill. However, what we heard about the trial in two days is almost unbelievable. Omar Khadr was raised in Canada. When he was nine years old, his father took him to Afghanistan where he was placed in a Taliban supporters' camp. There is no proof that the child had any choice in going, choosing his place of residence or the people he dealt with there. On 27/7/2002, the U.S troops supported by artillery fire and the air force attacked the location where Omar Khadr was placed. The commander of the attack forces (Col. W) who was the prosecution's witness during the first session of the trial said that three fighters were killed and that one, who is the defendant, survived. He also said that a hand grenade thrown from an alley killed the U.S soldier, and that Omar Khadr was present in the alley. However, another witness for the prosecution, who is a sergeant, said that the child was accompanied, in the alley, by a man who was shot in the back, blinded and hit with bomb shrapnel during the 4-hour battle. When the Colonel was asked during the trial why he failed to write a report at the time, he said that he was fighting and that he is not a policeman (he has 30 years of experience as police chief), and that he did not expect at all that those involved in the battle will appear before a court. How can a child being attacked by land and air be tried on charges of terrorism, while the [real] terrorists go free? In the autumn of 2001, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda's leadership were trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora. When the U.S Special Forces requested reinforcements to detain or kill the wanted men, their command did not send any help. I absolutely believe that the war cabal comprised of the advocates of an American empire and the Israeli neocons had started to focus on Iraq by then, and Syria and Iran after, to destroy Israel's enemies at the expense of American lives. Osama bin Laden, who is a terrorist and an enemy of Muslims in my book, responded to Bush in kind in October 2004, when he posted a video in which he attacked the U.S President in the last days of his presidential election campaign for a second term. While all the polls showed that the Americans were divided equally between Bush supporters and those of John Kerry, the number of voters in favor of Bush increased as soon as the video was distributed, and he won. The war cabal was working for Israel. However, both the legitimate resistance and the terrorists in Iraq foiled their plan, while Syria and Iran survived their onslaught. This is not to mention that Bin Laden wanted the U.S forces to become increasingly swamped in the Iraq war so that he can regroup and rebuild al-Qaeda's strength again. As a result, the Bush administration lost all its wars, the Obama administration lost the Afghan war for a second time, and al-Qaeda entrenched itself within the borders of the nuclear nation of Pakistan. I did not write a single word in my column today that was not first mentioned in U.S sources, even the analysis that concludes that Bin Laden had deliberately helped Bush in his video message, and even my reference to the deliberate failure of the U.S government to apprehend or kill Bin Laden, as this would eliminate its excuse to wage a war on terror. In truth, the reader can find full details that I only tackled in brief today in the following publications: - Plan of Attack, written by Bob Woodward. - American General, the memoirs of Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S Central Command at the time. - The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Susskind, who draws the majority of his information from sources within the U.S intelligence services. - The National Intelligence Estimate for 2006, which said that the Iraq war is attracting Islamist fighters from everywhere. - The report by the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate on Tora Bora. And yet, a child is prosecuted and the big war criminals escape…until further notice. [email protected]
