Lawyers level Guantanamo torture charges - Canadian Boy used as a 'Human Mop'

Attorneys representing an 18-year-old Canadian detainee at Guantanamo Bay - accused of killing an American soldier - claimed he was tortured by U.S. interrogators Wednesday, while his weeping mother pleaded for his release. Toronto-born Omar Khadr is accused of tossing a grenade that killed a U.S. Special Forces medic while fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, planting mines to target U.S. convoys and gathering surveillance. He was 15 when captured and 16 when he arrived at the U.S. naval base prison in Cuba in 2002. He has not been charged. "We have evidence that one of Canada's children has been tortured by the United States," said Khadr's American lawyer Muneer Ahmad. Ahmad said U.S. military police short-shackled Khadr and chained his hands and feet to a bolt in the floor, laughing while they forced him into painful and degrading positions and kept him that way for hours. At one point, Khadr urinated on himself and the floor. Ahmad said Khadr told him the military police then poured cleaning fluid on the floor and while he was still shackled, they dragged him through the liquid. "They used him as a human mop to clean up the urine," Ahmad said. "How could the United States do something so barbaric to a child?" Ahmad, who met Khadr in November, said military police had threatened to send Khadr to Israel, Egypt or Afghanistan where they told him he could be tortured or raped. [more]

• The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime. [more]