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Canadian At Gitmo 'Detained
Solely Because He Is Arab'
Khadr Admits He Trained At 'al-Qaeda Related' Camp
By Oliver Moore
The Globe and Mail
12-1-3


"I think that everybody has a right to be scared right now. Americans can catch you for no reason, put you away, not give you a lawyer, not give you anything."
 
Abdul Rahman Khadr admits learning to use assault weapons at an "al-Qaeda related" training camp but insisted that such instruction was routine for teens in war-torn Afghanistan.
 
He said that the camp was run by Arabs and that some graduates went on to fight the Northern Alliance and others travelled to foreign wars in Bosnia and Chechnya. The camp was never visited by Osama bin Laden while he was there, he said, and political instruction was not part of the curriculum.
 
Mr. Khadr - a Canadian citizen captured in Afghanistan and held by U.S. authorities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than a year - denied Monday that negative conclusions should be drawn from his training at such a camp.
 
He called the time he spent training "a waste of my life" but stressed that it was perfectly normal for youths in Afghanistan to learn to handle weapons.
 
"Every kid, when he's around 15, goes to train," he said
 
A few minutes later, badgered by reporters during a press conference in Toronto, he lashed out in exasperation.
 
"In the beginning, who were [the camps] made by? Americans. Who were they made by? By the West. Because of the war against the Russians in the very beginning, against the communists. It was very normal thing, everybody was supportive of what was happening in the very beginning when it was against communists," he said. "... Lots of the people who trained at these camps, they were not al-Qaeda. They [wanted] to come and fight against the Northern Alliance."
 
Mr. Khadr, now 20, said that he had been handed over to the Americans by a Northern Alliance commander - who, he said, detained him solely because he was an Arab and might thus be connected to al-Qaeda. After more than one year in the U.S. penal colony in Cuba he was told he would be released.
 
"I said I want to go to Canada, they said: 'Well, the Canadians don't want to take you, so we're going to take you back to where we captured you.'"
 
Flown to Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, with his ears and eyes covered, he was kept in complete isolation for the first 24 hours after his arrival. Only when his earphones and blindfold were removed, he said, did he realize that he was in Bagram, where he had been before. He said that the Americans handed him over to Afghan intelligence, who eventually released him.
 
With no passport or money, he said he tapped old friends of his father, people who had access to power and influence. He borrowed enough money to be smuggled to Islamabad, where he was turned away by guards at the Canadian embassy, and then on to Istanbul, where he was similarly rejected. It was only in Sarajevo, after his plight had become public, that he was received by Canadian diplomatic officials.
 
A reporter tried to suggest that, since it was the security guards and not the embassy officials who had spurned his pleas for help, the Canadian government could not be accused of forsaking him. That line of argument was blasted by Mr. Khadr's lawyer, Rocco Galati.
 
"Those security guards are officials, they are the gatekeepers to our embassy," he said, putting heavy emphasis on the word 'our'.
 
"I don't like these nonsense, disingenuous distinctions between the persons at the door and the persons behind the door, if you can't get behind the door it's the same thing. Those security guards are Canadian officials."
 
Mr. Khadr would say very little about his time in Cuba, citing fears that going public about conditions there could jeopardize his younger brother, Omar, who is being held on suspicion of having killed a U.S. military medic.
 
"I think that everybody has a right to be scared right now. Americans can catch you for no reason, put you away, not give you a lawyer, not give you anything," he said.
 
"My brother is in Cuba, he's a juvenile, he's been shot three times, he's half blind, he has to go to the hospital every two weeks ... and I don't see Canada doing anything about it."
 
The younger Mr. Khadr, who turned 17 in September, is now believed to be the only Canadian remaining at Guantanamo Bay.
 
© 2003 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.2
0031201.wkhad1201_3/BNStory/National/
 

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