On July 27, 2002 , an Al-Qa'ida compound in Afghanistan was bombarded by U.S. warplanes for four hours. The bombing over, U.S. soldiers stormed the compound. Inside, according to a document released accidentally by U.S. officials Monday, a soldier found two people still alive. There was a man who had an AK-47 beside him, "moving and moaning." The soldier shot this person in the head, killing him. The soldier, identified as only OC-1, said he saw a second person "sitting up facing away from him leaning against the brush." The soldier shot this person two times in the back. The second person was 15-year-old Omar Khadr, the Canadian who has now been held in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay for almost six years and who has become, on the evidence, an obsession with the Pentagon. The U.S. military has accused Khadr of throwing a grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer during the battle on July 27. No one saw him throw the grenade, but because he was, until this week, thought to have been the only person still alive in the compound, it was assumed that he alone could have thrown it.On that basis, now known to be inaccurate, a severely wounded boy of 15 was arrested, interrogated and sent to a prison halfway around the world. He is charged with "murder in violation of the laws of war," as well as attempted murder, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism and spying.

In the years since one of its soldiers shot Omar Khadr in the back, the U.S. has wasted little time worrying about whether a boy pinned under a four-hour bombardment had the mental capacity to conspire to carry out a war crime.

The Bush administration remains determined that this boy be treated as an enemy combatant and tried before one of its military commissions. This week, the U.S. trotted out more charges, accusing him of being involved in the killing of two soldiers with the Afghan army. The U.S. , under its own rules, does not have to prove Khadr killed the soldiers to be found guilty in their deaths.

This week the military launched its third attempt to try Khadr. Its first two efforts ended in defeat. The first time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the trial process was illegal. The second effort collapsed after a military judge determined that he lacked jurisdiction.

If even the slightest attention is paid to international law, this third effort should also meet an ignominious end. There is, for one thing, the matter of the American soldier's actions. They could prove illegal.

Human-rights groups say that Khadr's position, with his back to the entrance, leaning against a support, suggests the boy was injured and no longer part of the combat. "The laws of war, which the U.S. army is trained on, are clear - you cannot target non-combatants, which includes those persons who are injured and out of combat," Clive Baldwin, senior legal adviser at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, told Canwest news service.

Amnesty International has repeatedly laid out legal objections to the U.S. treatment of Khadr: It opposes in general the U.S. military commissions, a post-Sept. 11 invention that Amnesty International considers far below international judicial standards. Military commissions can admit testimony based on hearsay and statements obtained under torture.

In a letter Feb. 1 to the U.S. secretary of defence, several human-rights groups, including the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, blamed the U.S. for violating international treaties it has signed, requiring it to provide for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers within their jurisdiction.

The U.S. has seen to the rehabilitation of other children held at Guantanamo , sending them back to Afghanistan . Only Khadr has been treated as an adult, often roughly, he says.

Elsewhere in the world, child soldiers are treated as victims of the adults who used them as proxy fighters, at the Special Court for Sierra Leone , for example.

But the U.S. refuses to extend the same standard of fairness and justice to Khadr. If it were to do that, it would have to send him home to Canada . Why doesn't it? Because it doesn't have to. Canada is fine with this flagrant violation of human rights. This is not to our credit as a law-abiding nation.

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© The Gazette ( Montreal ) 2008