Hollywood to fete
'son of al-Qaida'
Canadian jihadist tied to bin Laden
cashes in with movie deal
Posted: July 15, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com
Abdurahman Khadr (courtesy: CBC)
A Hollywood film in the works will depict a Canadian formerly detained at Guantanamo as a reformed young man who now rejects terrorism and his family's ties to al-Qaida.
But there's evidence 21-year-old Abdurahman Khadr's true story doesn't fit the feel-good script proposed by Paramount Pictures, according to Andrew Walden, writing in FrontPage magazine.
Khadr is the son of Ahmed Saeed Khadr, a Canadian citizen whom the U.S. has accused of having direct ties to Osama bin Laden. He also is the brother of Omar Khadr, who, as WorldNetDaily first reported exclusively, is accused of killing a U.S. Special Forces medic.
Another brother is Abdullah Khadr, who, according to a Taliban spokesman, was the suicide bomber who killed Canadian Forces Corporal Jamie Murphy in Kabul Jan. 27.
Omar Khadr was released from the prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because the U.S. had no charges and believed he no longer was an intelligence asset.
Abdurahman Khadr returned to Canada in October after he was captured in Afghanistan and escaped the CIA, with whom he had made a deal to provide information undercover. That included a stint as a prisoner at Guantanamo and a mission to Bosnia, where he abandoned the CIA by entering the Canadian embassy in Bosnia.
After returning home, Abdurahman admitted he had been trained at an "al-Qaida-related camp" for three months in 1998, but played down his family's suspected ties to bin Laden.
"There's lots of organizations in Afghanistan that are connected to al-Qaida, but are different," Khadr said in Toronto last December, according to Reuters. "It's not training to kill Americans, it's just training to go and fight against the Northern Alliance."
The movie deal, according to Daily Variety, employs Oscar-nominated screenwriter Keir Pearson to write the script.
Abdurahman could earn as much as $500,000 from the project, scheduled to debut next year. According to Variety, the film apparently will follow the storyline that makes Khadr "look best."
Vincent Newman, president of Vincent Newman Entertainment, which owns the rights, calls it a "classic black sheep story -- a story about the rebel of the family."
The producer is considering actor Johnny Depp as the lead, Variety says.
Incompatible with the facts?
But Walden says that while the "tale of a young rebel who never reconciled himself to his family's extremist ways may set the hearts of Hollywood producers aflutter ... it would be difficult to tell a story more incompatible with the facts of Khadr's life."
Walden points out that when the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, the family moved from Canada to Afghanistan, where they could be closer to bin-Laden.
Abdurahman and his older brother Abdullah attended an al-Qaida training camp at Khalden, Afghanistan, where they received a grounding in terrorist ideology and weapons training.
The Khadr family was so close to bin Laden that eight months before the 9-11 attacks, the Khadrs attended the wedding of bin Laden's son, Mohammed.
In 1999, bin Laden attended the wedding of Abdurahman's sister Zaynab, who spoke openly of the family's connection to bin Laden in a February 2004 interview.
Describing bin-Laden as a family man who loves children, Zaynab stressed that "it was very important for him to sit with his kids every day at least for two hours in the morning after their morning prayer. They sit and read a book at least. It didn't have to be something religious. He loved poetry very much."
Abdurahman's brother, Abdullah, said of bin-Laden in a CBC News in March: "He never jokes, very quiet person, very polite," adding he can "be a saint, something like a saint. I see him as a very peaceful man."
Walden says Abdurahman appeared in "full confessional mode" in a CBC documentary on the Khadr family this spring, saying: "I admit it that we are an al-Qaida family. We had connections to al-Qaida." He also stressed that he disobeyed his father's directives to become a suicide bomber.
"I am a person that was raised to become an al-Qaida, was raised to become a suicide bomber, was raised to become a bad person, and I decided on my own that I do not want to be that," he has said.
But Walden finds many inconsistencies. After his 2002 capture in Afghanistan, Abdurahman was turned over to U.S. forces where in an interrogation he boasted close connections to the top echelons of al-Qaida leadership.
The CIA then offered a bonus of $5,000 for his cooperation and an additional monthly stipend of $3,000 for showing American investigators the locations of some al-Qaida members' former Kabul safe houses.
"Abdurahman agreed. The story of a chastened militant working with the U.S. in atonement for his past sins was born," says Walden. "But the story does not withstand serious scrutiny."
When Abdurahman's CIA handlers sent him to Bosnia a few months later, he became free of U.S. confinement for the first time and decided to get out, despite being showered with money.
Through the help of his grandmother and a lawyer, herself an al-Qaida sympathizer, Abdurahman made his way back to Toronto after walking away from the CIA and entering the Canadian embassy in Bosnia.
"Since then, Abdurahman has focused his energies on undermining U.S. efforts in the war on terror," Walden says.
Beyond complaining about the "unjust" treatment of his "al-Qaida family," he has taken to railing against the "harsh" conditions at Guantanamo Bay and claims that detainees are mostly harmless: "80 percent of people that went to Afghanistan. ... They've had enough. If you put them back in their countries they won't do anything."
Zaynab insists that her brother never had any intention of cooperating with the CIA:
"As long as he didn't really help them. If he did, I'd be really ashamed of him," she said. "If he just fooled them, I don't mind it. If he really did something, I'd be ashamed of him."
Abdurahman's mother Maha agrees: "He used his intelligence and it's okay," she said.
Abdurahman, for his part, has cast doubt on his made-for-T.V. conversion, Walden says.
"I'm my father's son," he explained in the CBC interview.
His father was killed in October 2003 in a gun battle with the Pakistani military.
In a recent interview, Abdurahman addressed his father's death. "To my father and to my mother, this is the ultimate in being an Islamic family because to them, dying all of us in the war against America, you know, is just being the top family because we all died in a way, you know, in fighting against American you know. Can you ask for more than that?"
The father was arrested in 1995 in connection with a bomb at the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad - a suicide attack that killed 17. According to the Ottawa Citizen, a Canadian Security Intelligence Service report says Khadr is "alleged to have moved ... money through" Human Concern International, a Canadian relief agency, "from Afghanistan to Pakistan to pay for the operation."
The Khadr family's relationship with the Canadian government was an embarrassment to former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who once intervened on behalf of the father.
Chretien pressed then-Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto during a trade mission to give Khadr due process in Canada.
