Posted on 07/16/2008 4:47:14 AM PDT by Clive
A retired U.S. soldier who was ambushed by armed fighters holed up in the mud compound where Omar Khadr was captured said on Tuesday the Canadian deserves to be at Guantanamo Bay.
Sergeant Layne Morris said he had not seen the dramatic interrogation video released by Mr. Khadr's lawyers, in which the young detainee cries for help, but he brushed off the footage as a public relations exercise.
Sgt. Morris said the defence lawyers' strategy seemed to be to win sympathy for their client, and that he found it "troublesome" the public had to be constantly reminded of what Mr. Khadr is alleged to have done six years ago.
"My lasting image of Omar is of him crouched in the rubble waiting for U.S. troops to get close enough so he could take one of them out, and he did that successfully and that is the underlying reason why we're all here in the first place," Sgt. Morris said.
"Omar is not a kid that was just snatched up off the street somewhere and has been wrongly charged and judged unfairly. I think he is precisely where he needs to be. He's earned that stay."
Sgt. Morris was serving with a Special Forces unit in eastern Afghanistan when his patrol came under fire on July 27, 2002. Pro-Taliban fighters shot dead two Afghan Militia Force troops and then opened fire on the Americans.
When the gun battle ended 4½ hours later, Sergeant Christopher Speer was dead and Sgt. Morris had shrapnel wounds that would cost him his eye. The Americans shot Mr. Khadr, then 15, as they entered the compound and brought him to Bagram air base. He is now being held at the controversial U.S. military camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
He has been charged with throwing the hand grenade that killed Sgt. Speer, although evidence has since surfaced suggesting that another fighter may have been responsible. Sgt. Morris says Mr. Khadr must have thrown the grenade because he was the only one left alive in the compound.
On Tuesday, Mr. Khadr's lawyers released seven hours of video footage that showed him being questioned by officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The lawyers said it was "beyond comprehension" that the Prime Minister had not yet returned Mr. Khadr to Canada.
"I haven't had a chance to look at it," Sgt. Morris, who lives in Utah, said of the video, "but I guess my thoughts are that if I'm ever in trouble, that's a bunch of defence attorneys that I'd like.
"They don't seem to be doing a whole lot of lawyering work. It's mostly PR work. And so it's kind of troublesome that the other side of the story has to be continually told in the media just to counter what the lawyers are trying to do in public."
Sgt. Morris and the widow of Sgt. Speer, Tabitha Speer, won a $100-million lawsuit against Mr. Khadr's father, Ahmed Khadr, a suspected al-Qaeda financier killed by Pakistani troops in 2003. Their lawyer, Don Winder, said on Tuesday he had been in touch with the Canadian government about collecting from the family.
National Post
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Controversial as in political gain potential for some perhaps, however I don't think it is at all.
Khadar and his ilk fight for the forces of evil and darkness. They want to impose a 12th century caliphate on the rest of us. They gladly execute women for showing too much leg or for trying to become educated.
I don't care if this guy was 12 years old when he was captured. I don't care if he was programmed by his father to fight infidels. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing. Three strikes and he is out.
I don't want this terrorist back in Canada unless it is to face a firing squad for treason.
I absolutely loathe the MSM. The video tape shows the weepy little fop, now that he is not armed with rifle and grenades. It's propaganda for the evils of Gitmo.
Would you like the halal rice with your Lemon Chicken, jihadi?
Nice try, media. Everyone knows this guy is a Muslim scumbag, no matter how much you try to portray him a victim.
bttt
Is a 21 year old man crying the best the critics of Gitmo can come up with? (I’m a prosecutor and I’ve seen alot of grown men crying in jail-it’s not a happy place.) Don’t the liberals ever realize that getting hysterical about putting panties on a terrorists head or a man crying only undermines the credibilty of their whole ‘torture’ argument?
Enough with the prisoners, already! Treat them according to Geneva Convention standards. They are non-uniformed illegal combatants, and may be killed when and where they are found.
If you didn't see the video, this typist's description would make you think that some kid is being tortured.
When you actually watch it, you see some young man crying like a weepy bitch blubberring about nonsense and making crap up as he goes along.
Terrorist: "I lost my eyes! I lost my feet and everything!"
Host: "No, your eyes are still there. You're feet are right there at the end of your legs where they always were."
Terrorist (while moving arms):"I can't move my arms! You don't care about me. You don't care."
Host: "Let me put the fan on for you, so you're cool..."
This reads like that Monty Python script. Is this for real ?
Yes! It's pretty close to word-for-word. I was typing it as they were saying it.
You should watch the video. It's idiotic that they're portraying this as some "expose" on the horrors of Guantanamo. We were meaner to freshman in my highschool.
Considering that not one single American soldier has survived captivity in either Afghanistan or Iraq, we have treated our captives with far more consideration than they deserve.
Our enemies have consistently murdered their western captives — military and civilian. They are butchers and do not deserve or require the protections of the Geneva Convention.
Moreover, another Canadian citizen returned recently from a stint as a guest of the US government in Guantanamo Bay. Abdurahman Khadr, 21, a Toronto resident whose family comes from Egypt, had trained at a Taliban camp in Afghanistan, where he fell into American hands. Khadr has the dubious honor of belonging to Canada’s first family of terrorism. His younger brother, Omar, is still interned in Guantanamo Bay, charged with killing an American soldier with a grenade in a firefight in Afghanistan. Khadr’s father, Ahmed Said, was killed in a shootout with security forces in Pakistan last fall, while still another brother, 14-year-old Abdul, was wounded in the same fight and now lies paralyzed in a Pakistani hospital. Only the oldest Khadr son, Abdullah, who once ran a Taliban training camp, is still at large. -———Maple Leaf Terror
FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | February 26, 2004 | Stephen Brown
Born in Egypt, Mr. [Ahmed Said] Khadr moved to Canada in the 1970s and began working with the Ottawa-based Muslim aid group Human Concern International in the 1980s.
Funded by the Canadian International Development Agency, Mr. Khadr took his family to the troubled Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, where he claimed to be helping refugees. Police and intelligence officials, however, say he was a guerrilla fighter involved with al-Qaeda.-——— “ Scarborough man ran terror camp: papers,”
National Post ^ | Februari 05 2003 | Stewart Bell
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