Khadr Almost Executed on the Battlefield

If the allegations are true and Khadr was almost executed on thee battlefield then there would no messy legal proceedings now. But the Geneva Conventions....they don't apply to terrorists. National Post

NEW YORK -- In a stunning new eyewitness account of Omar Khadr's July 2002 capture, a U.S. officer says he was about to order the execution of the Canadian terror suspect when U.S. Special Forces operatives intervened.

A diary entry by the officer that appears in legal documents released Wednesday says he'd just seen a soldier "waste" a still-living al-Qaeda suspect in the compound alongside Khadr.

"I remember looking over my shoulder and seeing [soldier's identity blacked out by U.S. government] just waste the guy who was still alive," writes the officer.

"He was shooting him with controlled pairs . . . " he adds, using a term denoting rapid one-two fire sometimes associated with execution.

....

According to the document, the officer went on to write the soldier next "had his sights right on him [Khadr] point blank."

In a reference in which the government has reduced the soldier's name to R, the officer adds: "I was about to tap R on his shoulder and tell him to kill him (Khadr), but the SF guys stopped us and told us not to."

[...]

The altered battle report coincidentally reflects two versions of what may have happened. It was written by the then on-scene commander, who has been identified before the war crimes commission that will eventually try Khadr only as Lt.-Col. W.

Part of the prosecution case will rest on W's testimony -- but the prosecution said he wouldn't voluntarily talk to Khadr's defence team.

"The officer's candid admissions in his diary about the circumstances under which the first combatant was killed and under which Mr. Khadr was captured -- rather than executed -- suggest that participants in the firefight may have possessed motive to fabricate parts of their account," the defence team writes.

"It is, therefore, all the more essential that the defence be able to depose LTC W, who presumably spoke to these individuals at the scene or shortly thereafter in the course of compiling his reports, if the defence is to have any hope of reconstructing the events that day."

Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler has suggested W's altered battle report may be part of a government bid to "manufacture" a story pointing to Khadr's guilt, and wants to ask him why he made changes to it in a way that makes the second version appear it was written as an original.

A military judge of commission, which sits at the U.S. navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, ruled Friday it was "in the interests of justice" that the defence be allowed to depose the lieutenant-colonel.

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