Supreme Court Asked to Stop Gitmo Trial

WASHINGTON -- The Army lawyer defending the last Western captive at Guantanamo turned to the U.S. Supreme Court Monday in a last-ditch bid to stop the upcoming war crimes trial of alleged Canadian terrorist Omar Khadr.

The Toronto-born Khadr, 23, was captured, critically wounded, at age 15 in Afghanistan in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound.

Pentagon prosecutors charge that Khadr committed war crimes for allegedly hurling a grenade that killed a Special Forces soldier in the July 2002 raid. The Pentagon also accuses Khadr of conspiring with al-Qaida to commit terrorism for allegedly helping to plant bombs along Afghan roadways to resist the U.S. invasion to topple the Taliban and rout al-Qaida after the 9/11 attacks.

But Army Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, Khadr's Pentagon-appointed defense lawyer, said in a statement Monday that U.S. plans to put him on trial before a military jury at Guantanamo later this month deny the Canadian due process because the court is designed for foreigners not American citizens.

"Separate is always unequal," said Jackson, noting that accused terrorists who are U.S. citizens "get all the protections of federal court."

"If you are a noncitizen, you are tried by a military commission. The military commissions provide young Omar, a Canadian citizen, only second-class justice," he said. "This kind of discrimination is something we cannot stand for as a country."

Jackson's emergency petition to the Supreme Court asks the justices to either order a lower court to consider Khadr's petition on the separate and unequal argument -- or to consider the case itself.

Federal judges had earlier said that, because Congress created the latest version of Military Commissions, civilian review would only be appropriate after a trial and in the case of conviction, an appeal through the war court system.

Meantime, the Defense Department is airlifting some 32 international journalists, many of them Americans and Canadians, to watch the resumption of pre-trial hearings in the Khadr case.

Defense lawyers want the military judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, to exclude any confessions Khadr made to U.S. interrogators following his capture, wounded and near dead, on grounds of either coercion or torture. Prosecutors seek to use statements Khadr made to his captors at age 15 and 16 at his upcoming trial.

The Canadian is the youngest of the war captives at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba and has been charged in every version of commission since the Bush administration introduced the first, which was subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Khadr prosecution is the most controversial at Guantanamo, where the Pentagon holds some 186 foreign detainees and has been condemned by international law experts, including President Clinton's former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, now head of UNICEF.

Critics cast his trial as the first of a so-called "child soldier" in modern Western history. They argue that Khadr should have been given special treatment, including rehabilitation, and not shipped from Afghanistan to the prison camps where he was held for years as an alleged teen terrorist among adult "enemy combatants."