At Guantánamo Bay, a hearing has begun on whether the US military elicited a false confession through the torture of a then-teenage prisoner accused of killing a US soldier in Afghanistan. Canadian citizen Omar Khadr was fifteen years old when US troops imprisoned him in Afghanistan in 2002. He says US military guards beat him and threatened him with rape after he arrived at Guantánamo that same year. Deputy Chief Defense Counsel Michael Berrigan said Khadr’s statements at the time should be ruled inadmissible.

Michael Berrigan: “The defense hopes that the statements that Omar Khadr has made that the government wants to admit as evidence against him will be suppressed, and that means that they will not be allowed to be admitted in evidence against him at his commissions trial, which is currently scheduled for this summer.”

Kadhr is set to be tried later this year in the first military tribunal of the Obama White House. Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada criticized Obama for continuing Bush-era policies.

Alex Neve: “I think we were expecting a lot more of the Obama administration. Obviously in January 2009 there was great hope and tremendous expectation that this whole sorry exercise in injustice here at Guantánamo Bay was going to come to a close, and certainly by April 2010, we wouldn’t be facing any military commission hearings, let alone a hearing involving someone who was fifteen years old at the time of the alleged offenses, someone who alleges a harrowing litany of torture and ill treatment. That is astounding.”