'Child' Detainee Nears Military Trial

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Knight Ridder | January 31, 2008

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon moved forward Jan. 30 with plans to try by military commission another Guantanamo detainee who was captured as a teenager in Afghanistan while fighting the U.S. invasion.

Mohammed Jawad, who is held in the prison camps as Detainee No. 900, allegedly lobbed a grenade inside a U.S. military vehicle carrying two U.S. Army sergeants and their Afghan interpreter in December 2002.

The move means Jawad, now 23, will likely be brought before a military judge at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba by early March to hear the charges. He could go on trial this summer.

Jawad is the fourth person charged under the latest formula for President Bush's post-9/11 war court, called military commissions. His name first surfaced as a trial candidate in October, when the Pentagon prosecutor swore out initial charges and the chief defense counsel assigned an Army reserves colonel to defend him at trial.

Defense Department documents say Jawad is an Afghan citizen, born in Pakistan, who had just turned 17 at the time of the attack. The four-page charge sheet said he would be tried for attempted murder as a war crime.

Susan Crawford, a Bush administration appointee overseeing the commissions, approved the charges just days before key legal arguments in the case of another Guantanamo detainee taken captive as a teenager.

Lawyers for Canadian Omar Khadr, 21, will argue at Guantanamo next week that their client should be spared war crimes charges in a July 2002 grenade attack that killed a Soldier in Afghanistan -- and instead should receive the protections of a "child soldier." He was 15 at the time.

Meantime, pre-trial motions next week in the case of an alleged al Qaeda foot soldier, Yemeni driver Salim Hamdan, will seek access to the now-secluded ex-CIA captives at Guantanamo in a site called Camp 7.

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