When is war a crime? - by Carol Rosenberg
When did the war on terror begin? Is the globe really one big battlefield? Can one gunman's firefight be another man's terror?
Or, is it like US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: "People know it when they see it"? At the military commissions in Guantanamo, the definition of the ongoing war on al Qaeda -- when it started, who is immune from prosecution -- is emerging as a core issue for military judges and eventually U.S. officers who will sit in judgment on alleged terrorists swept up in the Pentagon's global war on terrorism.
Defense lawyers for Guantánamo captives accused the prosecution of, in a sense, shaping the war to fit each detainee's circumstance. In the case of Omar Khadr, accused of throwing a grenade at age 15 that killed an American soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, his case alleges a war crimes conspiracy dating back to 1997, when his father moved the family from Toronto to Afghanistan. 'According to a recent US government filing, Omar allegedly began `conspiring' with al Qaeda to commit 'war crimes' as a 10-year-old child,'' Khadr's defense lawyer, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said in an e-mail. Ridiculing the US government's case, he added: 'Omar's `war' has consisted of being shot in the back, while wounded, after a four-hour bombardment, followed by years of illegal detention, coercive interrogation, and a planned trial for war crimes, which will likely result in a life sentence for little more than surviving the firefight in which he was shot.''
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