Omar Khadr: Portrait Of A Victim

Janet Hamlin, Pool/Associated Press

Young Mr.Khadr must certainly have the best public relations people in the business, because if he were a brand I’m sure I would have no trouble recognizing it in the supermarket. It seems as though every day there’s something new to report on Omar Khadr, the Canadian apprentice of terrorism caught at 15 years-old training with the Taliban in Afghanistan. On this day, we learn about how Mr.Khadr’s rights were violated in Guantanamo Bay, and that CSIS ignored them by not taking into account his youth and interrogating him after sleep deprivation sessions. A report from the security intelligence review committee [SIRC], a non-affiliated government committee that monitors CSIS, found that the intelligence agency needs to “adapt” to the more recent phenomenon of youth radicalization:

However, the report did not find that CSIS was complicit in Khadr’s alleged torture at the hands of U.S. interrogators.

The committee recommended that CSIS take human-rights issues into consideration in future probes and also establish a policy framework to guide its dealings with young people.

“As part of this, the service should ensure that such interactions are guided by the same principles that are entrenched in Canadian and international law,” the SIRC report said.

It’s funny. I don’t recall the Omar Khadr case being front and centre in the news during the days when the Liberals were in power. Both Jean Chretien and Paul Martin had the same opportunity as the Conservative government to ask for Omar Khadr’s release, yet they did not. But ever since 2006 rolled around, it’s become one of the favourite topics for discussion among those who self-identify as Liberal voters, and flogged in the media for partisan political points.

Let’s ignore for a moment that even though the government could formally request the United States to release Mr.Khadr, that such an endeavour would be merely symbolic at best, as the Americans continue to build a trial against the accused. Let’s even ignore the fact that young Omar was captured by the Americans while fighting with a radical enemy of the western world, and one that is ideologically and militarily aligned with al-Qaeda. Since many people would simply say that Omar Khadr was just a “child soldier”, or some similar such nonsense about his juvenile age, he bears no responsibility for his actions, and thus arguing about it seems fruitless.

What I’d like people to do then, is imagine what Canada would want to do with an American version of Omar sitting in a Canadian jail cell. What would we, the citizens of Canada, demand from our government in the case of a young American captured fighting with the Taliban, and suspected of killing one of our own soldiers? Wouldn’t we want our government to exhaust all legal avenues to find a way to hold him accountable for his crimes? Wouldn’t we demand justice for a soldier who died in the line of duty, senselessly killed by a person who by all rights should have been an ally?

We seem to hold Omar Khadr’s “human rights” on a rather lofty height, despite all he’s done to disinherit others of their own “human rights” when he fought and trained under al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We seem to forget the soldier he is accused of murdering; in fact, one can’t even find the soldier’s name in most articles about Omar. It’s Sergeant First Class Christopher James Speer. What happened to his rights, or the rights of his survivors?

The fact is, the government is doing exactly what most Canadians think they should be doing.