May 05
  • D.O.B: 9/19/1986
  • Residence: Toronto, CA
  • Nationality: Pakistani
  • ISN: 766
  • Date of Arrest: July 27, 2002
  • Place of Arrest: Ab Khail, Afghanistan
  • Age at time of arrest: 15

canada_omar_khadr2 Omar Ahmed Khadr

The below is from Cageprisoners:

Omar Khadr was born in 1986. He is the son of Ahmad Said Khadr, Egyptian, who came to Canada from his native Egypt in 1977, and Maha, a Palestinian-Canadian.

He has three brothers, Abdullah, Abdul-Rahman (21), Abdul-Rahim (14), and two sisters, Zaynab (23) and one who is the younger than him.

Whilst born and raised in Canada, the family moved to Afghanistan in the 1990’s, engaging in refugee work and establishing schools, to rebuild the country under the rule of the Taliban.

When the Americans began bombing Afghanistan, he went to Logar, East Afghanistan. After the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, Omar, now separated from his brother (In Kabul) and his family (who had fled to Pakistan) ended up at a suspected al-Qaeda base near Khost, Afghanistan, which was raided by American and Afghan troops in July 27, 2002. He allegedly killed an American medic with a hand grenade but was shot three times, captured and taken to Guantanamo. He lost one eye. He was 15 at the time of his arrest and has since been detained in Guantanamo Bay. There he has been denied medical treatment, due to his non-co-operation with his interrogators. He had an operation whilst in Afghanistan but remains in constant pain, without being treated with painkillers.

Abdul-Rahman, his brother, was also held at Guantanamo Bay from early 2003 until July 2003. He returned to Canada in November 2003. He admitted several months later to having been recruited into the CIA on his arrest in Afghanistan, and informing on his family, and al-Qaeda members in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Bosnia- Herzegovinia.

His father was killed in a gun battle, with the Pakistani forces, in South Waziristan in October 2003.

His younger brother, Abdul-Rahim, was shot in the firefight, in his spine, leaving him paralysed from the waist down.

His mother and sister remain in Pakistan, living off the charity of locals.

His elder brother remains in hiding in Pakistan. If he is captured it is probable that he will be sent to Guantanamo Bay.

Please take a moment to send a card to Omar. Something simple is fine. Remember he speaks and reads English, which makes it pretty easy to send something. Be sure not to write anything about current events, or it will be redacted.. Just a little note - anything at all, just to let him know that we are out here and we know he’s still stuck there. The address to write is below this one. You don’t even need an overseas stamp. If you can afford it, please consider donating a few dollars to his mother in Pakistan. Even just five US dollars can go a long way.

Write to him:Omar Khadr
Camp Delta
P. O. Box 160
Washington DC 20053
USA

To Donate to his family:
Family of Omar Khadr
c/o Cageprisoners
PO Box 45798
London
SW16 4XS

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Mar 28

27ammo02_190 U.S. government awards 22-year-old a $300 million contract to Efraim E. Diveroli

A lengthy investigation published Thursday reveals that the Pentagon gave an inexperienced 22-year-old a $300 million contract to provide ammunition to Afghanistan. The shady deal resulted in decades old, substandard munitions being delivered to US and Afghan troops fighting on the front lines of the war on terror.

The results of that investigation, which sent seven reporters across three continents, were published Thursday.

“But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur. With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces. Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.”

The company’s president was 22-year-old Efraim E. Diveroli

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Mar 11

The United Nations has delivered a grim assessment of the conflict in Afghanistan, reporting that violence increased sharply last year and resulted in the deaths of more than 8,000 people, at least 1,500 of them civilians.

In a report to the security council, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said the number of violent incidents rose from an average of 425 a month in 2006 to 566 each month last year.

The number of suicide attacks rose to 160 in 2007 from 123 in 2006 — with 68 attempts thwarted in 2007 compared with 17 in 2006, he said.

Ban claimed that while the insurgency drew strength from local people, much of the violence was led from abroad. “The support of foreign-based networks in providing leadership, planning, training, funding and equipment clearly remains crucial to its viability,” he said.

Current violence in Afghanistan is at its highest level since a US-led invasion in 2001 to oust Taliban rulers.

Read more 

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Mar 03

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hailed a new chapter in ties with Iraq and took a jab at the United States over its policies in the Middle East during a landmark visit to Baghdad on Sunday.

Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian president to go to Iraq since Saddam Hussein launched an eight-year war on Iran in 1980, in which 1 million people died. He is also the first leader from the region to visit since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

His two-day trip to a country where its long-time enemy the United States has more than 150,000 troops is as much about symbolism as about cementing economic and cultural ties between the neighbours, both run by Shi’ite majorities.

He rejected long-standing U.S. accusations, repeated by President George W. Bush on Saturday, that Iran is arming Shi’ite militias in Iraq who kill American soldiers.

“We tell Mr. Bush that accusing others will increase the problems of America in the region and will not solve them,” Ahmadinejad said in translated remarks at a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

“The Americans have to understand the facts of the region. Iraqi people do not like America.”

 Read more of this report here

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Feb 17

War Made Easy exposes a 50-year pattern of government deception and media spin that has dragged the United States into one war after another from Vietnam to Iraq. Narrated by actor and activist Sean Penn, the film exhumes remarkable archival footage of official distortion and exaggeration from LBJ to George W. Bush, revealing in stunning detail how the American news media have uncritically disseminated the pro-war messages of successive presidential administrations.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8383084962209910782&hl=en[/googlevideo]

(Media Education Foundation)

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Feb 13

Coverup: Behind the Iran Contra Affair is the third feature-length documentary produced by the Empowerment Project. The shadow government of assassins, arms dealers, drug smugglers, former CIA operatives and top US military personnel who were running foreign policy unaccountable to the public, revealing the Reagan/Bush administration’s plan to use FEMA to institute martial law and ultimately suspend the Constitution. Strikingly relevant to current events.
Full Video 72 Minutes

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8476042566108039966&hl=en[/googlevideo]

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Feb 06

Watch the below clip from an interview with Israeli channel 2. (2/5/08)

 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCBJm1X48XQ[/youtube]

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Feb 03

The film focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan Jitney taxi driver named Dilawar.  Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extra judicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.

Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America’s policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA’s use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defence of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularisation of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24.

The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in5OhVNCokc[/youtube]

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