Posted on 11/26/2007 4:32:47 AM PST by Clive
On Nov. 18, 60 Minutes ran a segment on the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay: Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen charged with murdering a U.S. soldier with a grenade when he was 15 and with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
Khadr's defence lawyers, various civil liberties proponents and some media feel Khadr should be treated as a child soldier, not be put on trial, and should be returned to Canada, where his mother, sister and brothers live.
The 60 Minutes report was unusually enlightening. It showed Khadr on video getting instructions and making landmines. Another shot seems to show him planting a mine.
There's no doubt he was trained (indoctrinated, if you like) by al Qaida. His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, had moved his whole family to Afghanistan to be close to Osama bin Laden. He was eventually killed by Pakistanti troops.
The 60 Minutes segment failed to mention that the elder Khadr (who came to Canada from Egypt) was arrested for a bombing attack on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan, but freed when then-prime minister Jean Chretien intervened on his behalf.
Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 when U.S. troops came under fire from a compound that was then reduced to rubble by U.S. aircraft.
The only survivor was young Khadr, who was shot three times after a grenade killed Sgt. Chris Speer, a medic who was intending to treat Khadr. As the lone survivor, Khadr was the only suspect.
That kinfolk in Toronto have described themselves as "an al-Qaida family" doesn't deter Khadr supporters.
The Toronto Star's Thomas Walkom says: "Khadr faces trial in a setting so unfair that it makes the Chinese justice system look reasonable." Consider that, for a moment. It's a ludicrous comparison. The U.S. says even if he's found guilty, Khadr won't face the death penalty (personally, as a combatant against invaders, I don't think he even committed a crime). He's well fed, he isn't harassed, he's entitled to refuse interrogation, his prayer times are respected, he has access to lawyers.
GUILT IS ASSURED
In China there are some 70 offences that carry the death penalty -- administered 1,000 times every year, more than the rest of the world combined. China warehouses death row inmates until their organs are required for transplants. There is no access to lawyers, guilt is assured upon arrest, persecution and punishment are done in secret and without restraint, appeals are meaningless.
Yet this is the justice system that Thomas Walkom finds more "reasonable" than what Omar Khadr faces.
What motivates people like that? In that same column he rebukes Stephen Harper whom he feels (rightly, I hope) won't be granting landed status to two U.S. army deserters, Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey, whose appeal to be accepted as "refugees" has been rejected by the Supreme Court.
The previous Liberal government also was cool to these guys. Unlike Vietnam war dodgers and deserters, they volunteered -- then chickened out because Iraq was too dangerous. They called it "conscientious" objecting to an illegal war.
If these guys want landed status, they'll have to apply outside Canada as other applicants do. Go home and face the music like men.
Perhaps Walkom speaks for others when he says Ottawa insists the process against Khadr is fair "because Khadr's human rights are being abused not by Beijing but Washington. And this government does not wish to irritate Washington." Talk about paranoia!
Our soldiers are at war in Afghanistan, against those on whose behalf Omar Khadr was fighting. From the 60 Minutes interviews with his family, it seems Omar has not had a change of heart, and still supports the cause to which his dad and family gave their allegiance -- and even their lives.
Surely this should concern Thomas Walkom and others who think like him.
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