Fighter Turned Informant, And Now Turned Away

[Hoss68]

Canadian Raised in al Qaeda Family Spurned, He Says, After Claiming He Worked for CIA

TORONTO -- Abdurahman Khadr traced an invisible X in the dark air, the mark of an outcast in his own family, a man rejected by his friends.

"The Arabs have X'd me out. It's like, 'You're done. . . . We don't want you around. My family hates me now and my sister sent an e-mail saying I was a [expletive] liar," Khadr said in an interview last week. "My grandmother doesn't want anything to do with me. Some people love me. Others hate my guts."

Five months after being released from custody at the U.S. naval detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Khadr, 21, has gone public with the claim that he was a CIA informant, and provided U.S. authorities with detailed information about Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorist network.

Khadr's story was first broadcast last week in a two-part Canadian television documentary, in which he described for the first time the life of his family in an al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan, in close quarters with bin Laden. Khadr, whose father and brothers also are linked to al Qaeda, provided a rare insider's view of bin Laden's operations and daily routine.

A CIA spokesman had no comment about Khadr, and a spokesperson for the Canadian intelligence service, CSIS, said "We don't publicly comment on who is of interest to us."

Since the broadcast, Khadr said he has not slept much, and has been in living in hotels in Toronto. But he said he is fatalistic about what might happen to him.

"If they have someone outside right now who will shoot me, nothing will change by me worrying about it now," he said, seated in a Pakistani restaurant, eating lamb kabobs.

Khadr's story is a complicated one, more so because he now says that he has lied in the past. Much of his tale could not be independently verified, largely because of intelligence agencies' unwillingness to corroborate the information.

Members of his family have long been identified by U.S. and Canadian intelligence as being connected with international terrorism. His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was born in Egypt and immigrated to Canada in 1977, and later became a leader in al Qaeda. In 1996, his father was arrested by Pakistani authorities in connection with a bombing at the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, his father was named on a U.S. international terrorist wanted list, known as al Kanadi -- the Canadian. He was reported killed on October 2, 2003, in a gun battle with Pakistani troops near the Afghan border.

Khadr has three brothers and two sisters. He said he and his brothers spent eight years in training camps in Afghanistan. He said his eldest brother, Abdullah, is in hiding. Abdurahman is the second of the four brothers. The third, Omar, was arrested in Afghanistan in July 2002, and is held at Guantanamo, accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. medic. The youngest, Karim, was wounded in the same gun battle near the Afghanistan border that killed his father, Khadr said. Karim, 14, is now in custody in a Pakistani military hospital.

"The Khadrs are pretty infamous," said John Thompson, director of the MacKenzie Institute, a Toronto-based nonprofit organization that studies organized violence. "There was intelligence before 9/11 that Khadr was a friend of bin Laden and was inside the al Qaeda command structure."

Abdurahman Khadr was born in the Persian Gulf emirate of Bahrain and grew up in Toronto and Afghanistan. Although he said he has an 8th-grade education, he speaks five languages, including Canadian-accented English. He knows hip-hop music and watches movies in Persian. He has straddled the cultures of North America and the Muslim world.

Khadr said his father moved the family in 1996 to a compound in Afghanistan, where Khadr first met Osama bin Laden. He said he recognized him from a photograph published in a magazine. Bin Laden, Khadr recalled, despised American products and rejected many modern conveniences, including ice and electricity.

"He is very serious and very concerned about the cause," Khadr said of bin Laden. "He said America had destroyed our culture, our economy and destroyed our everyday living. We will do anything to make them leave Saudi Arabia."

While bin Laden was younger than many of the leaders in the al Qaeda compound, Khadr said he was respected because he was rich. "If he didn't have money, nobody would give a [expletive] about him," he said.

While living at the compound alongside bin Laden's family, Khadr said he was rebellious and constantly getting into trouble for breaking rules. Once as a prank, he said he put gunpowder in a Pepsi can and set it off. "It went up and started doing turns. All Osama's bodyguards came out running," Khadr said. "Because my father was who he was, they didn't beat me up."

His father was angry. "He said, 'You are my kid. How could you behave this way?' I said, 'If Osama is happy with me, it doesn't mean I will become king of the world. I don't care about him.' " What Khadr said he wanted most was attention from his family and mostly his father. But his father rejected him.

"My father always told me, 'You are the cancer in the body of my family. He said when a body has cancer they cut off the part that has cancer so the rest of the body doesn't get it.' He said, 'If I keep you in this family you will affect your younger brothers and I don't want your brothers to come out like you because of smoking and drinking and rebelling and just being a troubled kid.' "

He said his father tried on three occasions to convince him to train as a suicide bomber. Khadr said it was apparent his father had two goals: bringing the family honor and getting rid of him.

"I totally refused," he said. "I didn't believe in suicide bombing no target. All that training, one year of mental and physical training. I didn't believe in killing innocent people."

When his father was killed, other family members told Khadr they were proud because they believed he died by the hand of the enemy, which was the best way to die. But Khadr said when he received word of his father's death, he had no feelings left for him.

"As my father, I will always love him, but not what he did," he said, taking a long draw from his cigarette and blowing the smoke out slowly. Khadr said he has trained himself to "skip" emotion. "I had no reaction," he said. "No emotion. I watched so many people being killed there was no reaction."

But Khadr rejects accusations in the Muslim community that he led the CIA to his father in exchange for his own release from Guantanamo Bay.

Khadr is 6 feet 3 and is missing two front teeth. He has a young boy's face and deep brown eyes. He was wearing clothing he said was given to him by U.S. officials: a black, wool coat the CIA bought for him in Bosnia, worn New Balance shoes they sent him from Germany, and a gray cotton T-shirt issued at Guantanamo Bay.

He said he was captured in November 2001 by forces of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, a militia that cooperated with the United States against al Qaeda and the country's Taliban government. He said he paid a $10,000 bribe to one of his captors to be freed, but was held for more than two months before being transferred to U.S. custody. The Americans, he said, asked questions about his father and brothers.

"They said we know your father has links, you cooperate and we will let you go," he said. Khadr said he told them anything they wanted to hear.

"I told them my brother was a trainer at a training camp," Khadr said. "That rumor was brought up by me when the Americans first got me. To boost my credibility with the CIA I told them he was a trainer. But that was a lie. That was a mistake. I'm very sorry now. I said a bunch of other lies. I told them other detainees were al Qaeda."

Khadr said the Americans sent him to Guantanamo Bay in a scheme to infiltrate the general prison population, spy on prisoners and identify prisoners who had spent time at training camps. "I wasn't useful in the past because of my bad record with al Qaeda," he said. "They thought I had ability in the future with all my languages."

Khadr said CIA agents gave him a $5,000 bonus payment and a promise of $3,000 per month. He said CIA agents asked him to sign a document acknowledging his work. But he said he did not keep a copy.

At Guantanamo Bay, he said that U.S. guards treated prisoners well, but he was unhappy with the isolation and finally demanded to be released. "After three months in general population, I couldn't take it. I said I was going to tell the Canadians the next time they came to see my brother, if they did not let me out."

In October, he said that CIA officers put him on a private jet to Bosnia to spy on the Muslim community there. But he said he still didn't like working alone. By late November, he asked to return to Canada, and he said his CIA contacts agreed. They asked him to turn in a fake Moroccan passport. The officials then gave him a cover story for his return to Canada. That was the version he told reporters when he held a press conference in Toronto on December 1. Khadr said he lied about being dropped off by Americans in Afghanistan without money and also lied about Canadian embassies refusing to accept him. "That was a plan concocted by the CIA," he said.

Walking through Toronto's Little India, Khadr said the neighborhood reminded him of Pakistan, with its restaurants, dress stores and shops where he can buy music and movies. But since he has appeared on television, he is not anonymous.

At a Pakistani restaurant, the owner recognized him and stopped him to pose for three photographs with him. "You did a good job. I am proud of you," the owner said.

But the owner of a tea shop down the street pretended when asked not to have seen him on television. The tea shop owner did want to say how much he hated him after he saw it. Khadr acted as if he were oblivious to the scorn. He ordered a treat wrapped in sweet leaves and kept walking down the street.

"I like attention," he said. "I won't deny it. Sometimes it can cost you your life, but I like it."

[cb88]

I'm glad for informants like him, but I"m not so sure if I were him (unless I had a death wish) I'd be out broadcasting what I'd done like that.

[RetPara]

This smells... Numnuts may of just signed his own death warrent.

Now he could be the 10% idiot; but if he was 'playing the game' for real... he would know just how high a risk coming out would be...

But then whom am I to talk...