OK
This Omar Khadr case is far more interesting than the banter in your local or national paper, on the evening news or on Twitter.
What I knew about this case before last week was that a youth, born in Canada, was captured fighting in Afghanistan and then languished for a decade in Guantanamo Bay. What has everyone talking this week is that the Federal government paid Mr. Khadr, now thirty years-old, a settlement of $10,500,000 for having allowed a Canadian child to be imprisoned for so long and under cruel and unusual circumstances in blatant violation of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as international law to which Canada is a signatory.
At the very least, opponents of the payout object to the size of the compensation. I think that's a ridiculous argument. I mean, if I offered you a million dollars to endure a single year of torture (sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, beatings, waterboarding and equivalents, being forced to urinate and defecate on yourself, shackled in stress positions and denied food – all documented as common practice in Guantanamo), even knowing it would end, you probably wouldn't make it through month one. And we're talking about a kid here. But our government broke a pile of laws, including its own, and allowed this teen to be held by a foreign government and rot in its notorious torture camp. Canada has been shown to have conspired with the US to allow the violation, and continued violation, of Khadr's basic human rights. As early as 2005 a US forensic psychologist had diagnosed Omar Khadr with severe post-traumatic stress disorder. Even the Supreme Court of Canada, all the way back in 2008, determined the government, its lawyers, and CSIS agents violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms with regard to Omar. Further still, the civil suit against the government was for $20 million so, under the circumstances, I'd say taxpayers got off easy and that anger toward Omar Khadr is better directed at the Harper government who got us here.
However, for others it's not about the money or the torture. They say he should remain in confinement, calling the man is a killer and pointing to the grenade which killed a U.S. soldier. (And while this is a grenade that Khadr admits to throwing it comes as a confession following his physical and psychological abuse.) However you feel about it their argument isn't too far out there. I mean, Canadian youth are tried and sentenced as adults all the time, and maybe this situation is a legitimate exception to legal and human rights norms. Maybe. But it could also be that most people with opinions on the matter don't have all the information. The available evidence in this case suggests two strongly conflicting factors. The soldier in question, who was killed, does not appear to have been hit by a Russian F1 grenade (those “pineapple grenades” typically used by al-Qaeda); instead, his external wounds and the internal x-ray images of the body suggest that what killed him was much smaller shrapnel consistent with that produced by an M67 fragmentation grenade – American standard-issue. (This alone, I think, makes this case much more interesting and still more tragic as well as producing significant doubt in a case where the accused has already done a significant amount of time.) The second confounding factor is that the location of the grenade's explosion as well as the direction it came from, not according to Khadr but the official eyewitness accounts of US soldiers, does not implicate Omar Khadr given where his unconscious body was recovered, buried among the rubble of the village leveled by air strikes immediately after the grenade was thrown. These two elements alone force any reasonable person to have more than sufficient reasonable doubt. But there's more. In addition to all this we also now know US military documents were altered, with critical details in soldier reports changed where they conflicted with what became the official statement of events. As if the aforementioned wasn't enough this case actually seems to me to be still messier than this.
Most who hear these details, convinced of Khadr's guilt, go on to reiterate that he was without a doubt fighting with the enemy. They suggest that he was with these bad guys, wished to fight, and had every intention to kill... All true. Further, Khadr admits to having both built and planted roadside explosives; and, unlike with the grenade, this wasn't merely a coerced confession but is instead corroborated by ample video footage of him doing so. (You can find that footage on YouTube.) Given these facts, it's very reasonable to assume he was responsible for casualties, whether or not he killed a US soldier with a grenade during one particular skirmish. On top of all this, we also know he ended up where he was by his own request. Against his mother's protest, Omar tells us he asked his father and was given permission to act as a Pashto translator to a group of Arabs associated with Abu Laith al-Libi, spokesman and senior military commander of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. This places Omar Khadr as more of a willing party and valuable enemy asset than just a kid caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And yet, while all this is true it doesn't change the international norm of treating the recruitment and use of children in war as a war crime – and of these children not as criminals but as victims. I think that's pretty sane.
So where does all this put us? What's the right response? I don't know. But what I do know is that we didn't give a healthy and innocent victim free housing, food, transportation, and education for life, as some suggest. Instead, we gave a man – a bomb-builder raised on extremist ideology, sympathetic to the cause of violent jihad, and diagnosed with a severe psychological disorder (who now has even more tangible and potent reasons for hatred of the West); whose brother attended and was given weapons and explosives training at a notorious al-Qaeda training camp along with Zacarias Moussaoui, Ahmed Ressam, and others; whose father was a long-time friend of Osama bin Laden, financier of al-Qaeda, whose biography was featured in al-Qaeda's "Book of 120 Martyrs in Afghanistan" after he was killed among a group of al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders at a safe-house in Pakistan, and who stated publicly that he hated Canada and “only returned to the 'dirty swamp' that is Canada for medical treatment and money”; whose mother is referred to in the same al-Qaeda biography as her husband as sharing in his “march to jihad”, and who is on record as saying that she didn't want to raise her sons in Canada because she feared they'd become gay – a positively tremendous sum of cash.
But I'm sure Omar just wants to settle down, have a quiet and simple life in rural Alberta, and be left alone. I mean, wouldn't you?
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