Welcome back Khadr

Canadians are the worst wooses on the planet. The amount of sympathetic wailing and hand wringing the citizens of this country are demonstrating over this “child soldier” is a clear indication that very few people in this country seem to know which side is up.

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The number of individuals who are demanding that young Khadr be repatriated and tried under Canadian law is turning from a groundswell into a tsunami. Although I am clearly not a lawyer, even I know that trying Omar Khadr under Canadian law isn’t really possible, as to the best of my knowledge, Canada currently doesn’t have a law in place that prohibits its citizens from fighting wars in foreign lands. But let’s assume that this first hurdle could somehow be circumvented and he were tried in Canada, Khadr would fall under the auspices of the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), which would hold that since the poor misguided lad was only 15 at the time of his alleged crime, he clearly didn’t know the ramifications of his actions and thus deserves another chance to be rehabilitated into Canadian society. Are Canadians crazy?! Do we really want a hardened al Qaeda/Taliban fighter, whose entire family is dedicated to the destruction of our way of life, to come back and rejoin our society? Are we so foolish that we seek to have trained terrorists come live with us? I know Khadr is a Canadian citizen and all, but frankly, the Americans are doing us a favor by keeping him and trying him under their laws. And while many are saying that America’s actions are in contravention of international law, a strong case can and has been made about Khadr being an “illegal” enemy combatant. After all, Khadr’s father and brother were engaged in a gunfight with Pakistani and American troops in Afghanistan that left the elder Khadr dead and Omar’s brother Abdulkareem a paraplegic. Later Omar Khadr was alleged to have thrown a grenade that resulted in the death of Staff Sergeant Christopher Speer and the loss of Sergeant Layne Morris’s eye, after the Americans had killed or captured a number of al Qaeda fighters in a small hamlet. Khadr was taken prisoner and eventually shipped off to Guantanamo Bay’s terrorist detention facility where he claims he was tortured. The evidence of Khadr’s torture appears to be as sketchy as what critics are claiming the evidence of his throwing a grenade is. The desire to have Khadr brought to Canada and tried here isn’t so much about being compassionate to the “child soldier” than it is about politics. This is really nothing more than a cynical power play on the part of dissatisfied Canadians to make Stephen Harper and the Conservatives look bad. In the process they hope to make Stephane Dion’s Liberals look good. Moreover, it’s also an attempt to stick it to the much-despised George Bush, whom most Canadians seem to see as the devil incarnate. If any of the people clamoring to have Khadr returned to this country really cared about Canada’s future they’d stay out of this and allow these proceedings to take their course. Omar Khadr being tried by the American military as an illegal combatant is a perfectly legal maneuver in that soldiers are to be clearly identifiable through a uniform precisely to avoid situations such as the one for which Khadr is now standing trial. You can’t kill soldiers with a grenade one minute and then claim to be an innocent civilian victim of warfare the next. The evidence that will be presented at the trial Omar Khadr is now facing will determine whether he is a terrorist killer or an unfortunate innocent caught up in events beyond his control. And it would be best if his fellow Canadians didn’t use this issue to further their own base political agendas.