Accused terrorist Omar Khadr, who has been linked to al Qaeda, pleaded not guilty Monday to all charges he faces in a military trial at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base on Cuba.

During legal maneuvering earlier in the day, lawyers had presented two starkly different images of the defendant, one that portrayed him as a committed al Qaeda fighter and the other that described him as a child forced into war by adults.

Prosecutor Jeff Groharing told the Military Commission that the Canadian-born terrorism suspect was aware of al Qaeda ideology. “He embraced it and used it to justify his own activities,” Groharing said of Khadr, the youngest detainee at the facility.

At the same time, Khadr’s Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, Lt. Colonel Jon Jackson, has repeatedly called his client a “child soldier” who was forced into fighting in Afghanistan by adults and threatened with violence if he did not provide statements to U.S. interrogators.

The 23-year-old Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan, is charged with assisting al Qaeda and with killing a U.S. Special Forces soldier. A closed-circuit television link viewed by journalists showed Khadr slumped in his chair, reading documents and talking with others at the defense table during courtroom arguments. Behind him sat three uniformed guards.

(Source: CNN)