Posted on 07/15/2005 3:15:18 PM PDT by CHARLITE
A Hollywood film in the works will depict a Canadian formerly detained at Guantanamo as a reformed young man who now rejects terrorism and his family's ties to al-Qaida.
But there's evidence 21-year-old Abdurahman Khadr's true story doesn't fit the feel-good script proposed by Paramount Pictures, according to Andrew Walden, writing in FrontPage magazine.
Khadr is the son of Ahmed Saeed Khadr, a Canadian citizen whom the U.S. has accused of having direct ties to Osama bin Laden. He also is the brother of Omar Khadr, who, as WorldNetDaily first reported exclusively, is accused of killing a U.S. Special Forces medic.
Another brother is Abdullah Khadr, who, according to a Taliban spokesman, was the suicide bomber who killed Canadian Forces Corporal Jamie Murphy in Kabul Jan. 27.
Omar Khadr was released from the prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because the U.S. had no charges and believed he no longer was an intelligence asset.
Abdurahman Khadr returned to Canada in October after he was captured in Afghanistan and escaped the CIA, with whom he had made a deal to provide information undercover. That included a stint as a prisoner at Guantanamo and a mission to Bosnia, where he abandoned the CIA by entering the Canadian embassy in Bosnia.
After returning home, Abdurahman admitted he had been trained at an "al-Qaida-related camp" for three months in 1998, but played down his family's suspected ties to bin Laden.
"There's lots of organizations in Afghanistan that are connected to al-Qaida, but are different," Khadr said in Toronto last December, according to Reuters. "It's not training to kill Americans, it's just training to go and fight against the Northern Alliance."
The movie deal, according to Daily Variety, employs Oscar-nominated screenwriter Keir Pearson to write the script.
Abdurahman could earn as much as $500,000 from the project, scheduled to debut next year. According to Variety, the film apparently will follow the storyline that makes Khadr "look best."
Vincent Newman, president of Vincent Newman Entertainment, which owns the rights, calls it a "classic black sheep story -- a story about the rebel of the family."
The producer is considering actor Johnny Depp as the lead, Variety says.
Incompatible with the facts?
But Walden says that while the "tale of a young rebel who never reconciled himself to his family's extremist ways may set the hearts of Hollywood producers aflutter … it would be difficult to tell a story more incompatible with the facts of Khadr's life."
Walden points out that when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, the family moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they could be closer to bin-Laden.
Abdurahman and his older brother Abdullah attended an al-Qaida training camp at Khalden, Afghanistan, where they received a grounding in terrorist ideology and weapons training.
The Khadr family was so close to bin Laden that eight months before the 9-11 attacks, the Khadrs attended the wedding of bin Laden's son, Mohammed.
In 1999, bin Laden attended the wedding of Abdurahman's sister Zaynab, who spoke openly of the family's connection to bin Laden in a February 2004 interview.
Describing bin-Laden as a family man who loves children, Zaynab stressed that "it was very important for him to sit with his kids every day at least for two hours in the morning after their morning prayer. They sit and read a book at least. It didn't have to be something religious. He loved poetry very much."
Abdurahman's brother, Abdullah, said of bin-Laden in a CBC News in March: "He never jokes, very quiet person, very polite," adding he can "be a saint, something like a saint. I see him as a very peaceful man."
Walden says Abdurahman appeared in "full confessional mode" in a CBC documentary on the Khadr family this spring, saying: "I admit it that we are an al-Qaida family. We had connections to al-Qaida." He also stressed that he disobeyed his father's directives to become a suicide bomber.
"I am a person that was raised to become an al-Qaida, was raised to become a suicide bomber, was raised to become a bad person, and I decided on my own that I do not want to be that," he has said.
But Walden finds many inconsistencies. After his 2002 capture in Afghanistan, Abdurahman was turned over to U.S. forces where in an interrogation he boasted close connections to the top echelons of al-Qaida leadership.
The CIA then offered a bonus of $5,000 for his cooperation and an additional monthly stipend of $3,000 for showing American investigators the locations of some al-Qaida members' former Kabul safe houses.
"Abdurahman agreed. The story of a chastened militant working with the U.S. in atonement for his past sins was born," says Walden. "But the story does not withstand serious scrutiny."
When Abdurahman's CIA handlers sent him to Bosnia a few months later, he became free of U.S. confinement for the first time and decided to get out, despite being showered with money.
Through the help of his grandmother and a lawyer, herself an al-Qaida sympathizer, Abdurahman made his way back to Toronto after walking away from the CIA and entering the Canadian embassy in Bosnia.
"Since then, Abdurahman has focused his energies on undermining U.S. efforts in the war on terror," Walden says.
Beyond complaining about the "unjust" treatment of his "al-Qaida family," he has taken to railing against the "harsh" conditions at Guantanamo Bay and claims that detainees are mostly harmless: "80 percent of people that went to Afghanistan. ... They've had enough. If you put them back in their countries they won't do anything."
Zaynab insists that her brother never had any intention of cooperating with the CIA:
"As long as he didn't really help them. If he did, I'd be really ashamed of him," she said. "If he just fooled them, I don't mind it. If he really did something, I'd be ashamed of him."
Abdurahman's mother Maha agrees: "He used his intelligence and it's okay," she said.
Abdurahman, for his part, has cast doubt on his made-for-T.V. conversion, Walden says.
"I'm my father's son," he explained in the CBC interview.
His father was killed in October 2003 in a gun battle with the Pakistani military.
In a recent interview, Abdurahman addressed his father's death. "To my father and to my mother, this is the ultimate in being an Islamic family because to them, dying all of us in the war against America, you know, is just being the top family because we all died in a way, you know, in fighting against American you know. Can you ask for more than that?"
The father was arrested in 1995 in connection with a bomb at the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad – a suicide attack that killed 17. According to the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian Security Intelligence Service report says Khadr is "alleged to have moved ... money through" Human Concern International, a Canadian relief agency, "from Afghanistan to Pakistan to pay for the operation."
The Khadr family's relationship with the Canadian government was an embarrassment to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who once intervened on behalf of the father.
Chretien pressed then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto during a trade mission to give Khadr due process in Canada.
Remember the guy who got on a plane with a bomb built into his shoe and tried to light it?
Did you know his trial is over?
Did you know he was sentenced?
Did you see/hear any of the judge's comments on TV/Radio?
Didn't think so.
Everyone should hear what the judge had to say.
Ruling by Judge William Young, US District Court:
Prior to sentencing, the Judge asked the defendant if he had anything to say.
His response: After admitting his guilt to the court for the record,
Reid also admitted his "allegiance to Osama bin Laden, to Islam, and to the religion of Allah," defiantly stated "I think I will not apologize for my actions," and told the court "I am at war with your country."
Judge Young then delivered the statement quoted below:
January 30, 2003, United States vs. Reid. Judge Young:
"Mr. Richard C. Reid, hearken now to the sentence the Court imposes upon you.
On counts 1, 5 and 6 the Court sentences you to life in prison in the custody of the United States Attorney General. On counts 2, 3, 4 and 7, the Court sentences you to 20 years in prison on each count, the sentence on each count to run consecutive with the other.
That's 80 years. On count 8 the Court sentences you to the mandatory 30 years consecutive to the 80 years just imposed. The Court imposes upon you each of the eight counts a fine of $250,000 for the aggregate fine of $2 million. The Court accepts the government's recommendation with respect to restitution and orders restitution in the amount of $298.17 to Andre Bousquet and $5,784 to American Airlines. The Court imposes upon you the $800 special assessment.
The Court imposes upon you five years supervised release simply because the law requires it. But the life sentences are real life sentences so I need go no further This is the sentence that is provided for by our statutes. It is a fair and just sentence. It is a righteous sentence.
Let me explain this to you. We are not afraid of you or any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid. We are Americans. We have been through the fire before. There is all too much war talk here and I say that to everyone with the utmost respect Here in this court, we deal with individuals as individuals and care for individuals as individuals. As human beings, we reach out for justice.
You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. Whether it is the officers of government who do it or your attorney who does it, or if you think you are a soldier. You are not----- you are a terrorist. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not meet with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.
So war talk is way out of line in this court. You are a big fellow. But you are not that big. You're no warrior. I've know warriors. You are a terrorist. A species of criminal that is guilty of multiple attempted murders. In a very real sense, State Trooper Santiago had it right when you first were taken off that plane and into custody and you wondered where the press and where the TV crews were, and he said: "You're no big deal."
You are no big deal.
What your able counsel and what the equally able United States attorneys have grappled with and what I have as honestly as I know how tried to grapple with, is why you did something so horrific. What was it that led you here to this courtroom today?
I have listened respectfully to what you have to say. And I ask you to search your heart and ask yourself what sort of unfathomable hate led you to do what you are guilty and admit you are guilty of doing. And I have an answer for you. It may not satisfy you, but as I search this entire record, it comes as close to understanding as I know.
It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose. Here, in this society, the very wind carries freedom. It carries it everywhere from sea to shining sea. It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see, that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely. It is for freedom's sake that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their representation of you before other judges.
We Americans are all about freedom. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties. Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bare any burden; pay any price, to preserve our freedoms. Look around this courtroom. Mark it well. The world is not going to long remember what you or I say here. Day after tomorrow, it will be forgotten, but this, however, will long endure. Here in this courtroom and courtrooms all across America, the American people will gather to see that justice, individual justice, justice, not war, individual justice is in fact being done. The very President of the United States through his officers will have to come into courtrooms and lay out evidence on which specific matters can be judged and juries of citizens will gather to sit and judge that evidence democratically, to mold and shape and refine our sense of justice
See that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag stands for freedom. And it always will.
Mr. Custody Officer. Stand him down.
So, how much of this Judge's comments did we hear on our TV sets?
We need more judges like Judge Young, but that's another subject. Pass this around. Everyone should and needs to hear what this fine judge had to say.
Powerful words that strike home.
God bless America.
He was already in the Frontline documentary. Fascinating story he. Deserves a movie.
Sometimes it is difficult for me to express myself without cussing a blue streak.
This is one of those times. I can only shake my head at the lack of soul the people in Hollywood seem to enjoy.
I understand that we are at war with Muslims. I expect more from my fellow country men.
I am shocked and saddened.
oh great...world net daily just outed a CIA operative.
"I can only shake my head at the lack of soul the people in Hollywood seem to enjoy."
See the Frontline documentary. This article is almost total b.s. and twists information.
He knew about Guantanamo because he served there as a spy for us, then he served as a spy in Bosnia. His problems with his family were extreme, to say the least.
Finally, Hollywood has found a family whose values it can celebrate. It's an al Qaeda family but hey, you gotta start somewhere.
"It's not training to kill Americans, it's just training to go and fight against the Northern Alliance."
"To my father and to my mother, this is the ultimate in being an Islamic family because to them, dying all of us in the war against America, you know, is just being the top family because we all died in a way, you know, in fighting against American you know. Can you ask for more than that?"
Well, no. But it is more than fighting a war against the Northern Alliance.
"It's not training to kill Americans, it's just training to go and fight against the Northern Alliance."
"To my father and to my mother, this is the ultimate in being an Islamic family because to them, dying all of us in the war against America, you know, is just being the top family because we all died in a way, you know, in fighting against American you know. Can you ask for more than that?"
Well, no. But it is more than fighting a war against the Northern Alliance.
Why do terrorists and families support them like that and our solidiers have to deal with Foodstamps?
We have a morale problem, people.
The way black music was holywoodianized in rap, now we have terrorists holywoodianized too.
I also thought it was illegal to profit from war and for "families" to incite war against the US.
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