Email: lhajjar@soc.ucsb.edu

Tel. +1-805-236-4144

Hajjar has just returned from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where she was observing the pre-trial hearing before a military commission of Omar Khadr. Khadr is accused of killing a US soldier with a grenade in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15. Shortly before the hearing, he fired his three American lawyers as part of an effort to boycott the proceedings. The judge, an Army colonel, refused Khadr's wish not to be represented by any lawyer and ordered that military counsel continue to handle his case. The next hearing is tentatively scheduled to begin August 10.

Hajjar commented: “The hearing was like Abbott and Costello's 'who's on first' routine. As Khadr repeated that he was boycotting the proceedings, the judge persisted in questioning him about his competence to represent himself. Khadr pulled back the curtain hiding the haphazard nature of these extra-constitutional judicial venues. When asked if he knew the 'rules of evidence' for the military commissions, for instance, Khadr replied, 'The rules are always changing, so knowing the rules doesn't really matter.' We have drawn one step closer to the first prosecution of a child soldier since Nuremberg.”
Lisa Hajjar is associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Santa Barbara and an editor of Middle East Report. She is author, most recently, of "Grave Injustice: Maher Arar and Unaccountable America," Middle East Report Online, June 24, 2010.