So sorry to harsh anybody’s Friday night buzz but here’s a doozey of a buzzkill for ya. My apologies. I’m just sick and in tears … This ruling was official a couple of weeks ago but only made publicly available [9 page PDF] this morning, and of course Carol Rosenberg is on it.
An Army interrogator’s tale of gang rape in an American prison didn’t coerce Canadian captive Omar Khadr to confess to anything while he was held as a teen terror suspect in Afghanistan, a military commissions judge said in a Guantánamo war court ruling made public Friday.
Army Col. Patrick Parrish, the judge, also found “no credible evidence” of torture in the U.S. military’s interrogations of the Toronto-born Khadr, who was nearly dead when captured in a Special Forces raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.
“While the accused was 15 years old at the time he was captured, he was not immature for his age,” Parrish wrote in a nine-page ruling dated Tuesday.
In it, the judge rejected a defense request to exclude Khadr’s confessions to U.S. interrogators from his war crimes trial on grounds of coercion and torture.
snip
“There is no credible evidence that the accused was ever tortured,” the judge wrote, “even using a liberal interpretation considering the accused’s age.”BY CAROL ROSENBERG (Miami Herald)
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/201…
EDIT: Just saw that emptywheel has a fresh piece up at FDL
So the guy running the Kangaroo Court for this child soldier has decided that rape threats do not constitute a threat of severe pain or suffering.