I don’t think so.

The coverage of Ted Kennedy’s death is preventing the claims of Mohammed Jawad from getting wider media coverage in the US. Jawad states that he was sent to Guantanamo at the tender age of 12:

In December 2002, when he says he was only 12, he was arrested on suspicion of throwing a grenade into a Jeep carrying US special forces soldiers through Kabul, wounding two of them and an interpreter. He was taken first to an airbase north of Kabul, then to the US prison in Guantánamo Bay…

He has a bit of a credibility problem though – he claims his father died in the 1980s while fighting the Soviets, and the Pentagon claims that bone scans indicate he was 18 when arrested.

According to the article he’s a minor celebrity in Afghanistan, but he’ll have a hard time getting broad-based sympathy in the US. A recent Gallup Poll reported that 45% of Americans favor keeping Guantanamo open:

President Obama’s most loyal supporters — Democrats and liberals — do lean decisively toward closing the U.S. prison there. But Americans overall do not express such a clear preference, and in fact are more likely to prefer keeping the prison open.

Closing Gitmo would further alienate a broad segment of voters that Obama needs if he is to salvage his presidency. The groups that want to pressure the US to close it need to do a lot better than this obvious falsehood if they expect to change US public opinion and get President Obama to act.