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Prime Minister Stephen Harper says he will not seek to bring alleged Canadian terrorist Omar Khadr home from Guatanamo Bay prison despite the unsealing of documents that reveal Canadian officials knew that he was deprived of sleep and forced to change cells every three hours to “make him more amenable and willing to talk.”

Mr. Harper's government has long insisted that it sought and received assurances from the U.S. that Mr. Khadr was being treated humanely, but the documents dating from 2003 and 2004 – when Mr. Khadr was 17 years old – indicate Canadian officials knew of his conditions and mistreatment.

On Thursday, Mr. Harper said Mr. Khadr is accused of serious crimes, and there's no real alternative to the special military hearings he faces – and he has no intention of asking for him to be sent to Canada.

“The answer is no,” Mr. Harper said. “The former government and our government, with the advice of the Department of Justice, considered all the questions there, and the situation remains the same.”

He argued that the special U.S. military trial that Mr. Khadr faces – in which he does not have the same standard of legal representation and rights he would in an ordinary criminal trial – is the only way he could be brought to answer the charges against him.

“Mr. Khadr is accused of very serious things. There is a legal process in the United States. He can make his arguments in that process,” Mr. Harper said on a visit to Tokyo after the three-day summit of G8 leaders in northern Japan.

“But frankly, we do not have a real alternative to that process now to get to the truth about those accusations, and we believe that this process should continue. So we are looking at that process with great interest. And we continue to seek assurances of the good treatment of Mr. Khadr.”

Mr. Khadr's U.S. military lawyer, Navy Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler, took issue, however, with that in an interview Thursday on CTV's Canada AM.

“I think that what is being done to Omar Khadr right now rests squarely on the shoulders of Prime Minister Harper,” Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler said.

“There is very little question that if Canada, the last western country to allow its citizen to be detained in Guantanamo Bay, demanded Omar's repatriation from Guantanamo to face due process under Canadian law, that the U.S. government would heed that request,” he said.

Lt.-Cmdr. Kuebler said the Canadian government has known since at least 2004 that U.S. assurances regarding the treatment of Mr. Khadr were false, “yet continued to hide behind those assurances in allowing Omar to be detained in Guantanamo Bay.”

He said videotaped interviews with Mr. Khadr are expected to come out in the next few days and that the contents are likely to be “quite powerful.”

Mr. Khadr was 15 when he was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. He faces multiple terrorism-related charges, the most serious dealing with the killing of a U.S. soldier. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.