One of the youngest persons ever detained at the notorious U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay is now Canada’s problem, said John Ibbitson in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Omar Khadr has been transferred to a prison in this country to serve out the remainder of an eight-year sentence for murder and other charges issued by a U.S. military commission. He could be eligible for parole as soon as next year. Born in Toronto to an Egyptian jihadist father and a Palestinian mother, Khadr was raised in Canada and Pakistan, where he and his father trained as militants. He was just 15 when, in 2002, he was seriously wounded and captured on the Afghan battlefield. From the start his case divided Canadians. Some saw him as a victim, “duped by his family” into fighting, and then swept into “the Bush government’s abusive war against terrorists.” Others, including the current Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, would have been happy to see him “languish in Guantánamo for the rest of his life.” The Harper government did “everything in its legal power, short of a diplomatic breach with the U.S. government,” to keep him out of Canada, but last week it finally exhausted its options. Khadr is now “out of the Obama administration’s hair, and in the Harper government’s.”
Let’s hope Canada treats him better than America did, said Sheema Khan, also in the Globe and Mail. Khadr was a child soldier, indoctrinated as a boy and sent to the Afghan battlefield by age 13. Even though the U.S. had ratified the U.N. convention on child soldiers, which requires such children to be counseled and repatriated, it imprisoned the wounded teenager in Guantánamo, where he was “subjected to torture and mind games.” Apparently, if you’re an African teenager who kills another African, you’re an exploited child soldier who deserves help. But if you’re a teenager who kills an American, you’re a terrorist.
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