Counterpoint:
The intractable problem with Omar Khadr is simply his existence. The politicians who seem to crave ( more of ) his blood are, in an understandable way, trying to punish the behaviour of his father.
No one who has read Sophocles or the Old Testament can fail to recognize the mentality at work here. Omar Khadr is the manifestation of a curse upon the state.
Nothing makes me feel that my lifetime is a cage, narrow and confining, so much as the occasional bubblings- up of the Omar Khadr saga. July 27 will mark the 15th anniversary of the Afghanistan firefight in which Khadr was shot to pieces and captured. Khadr is now 30, and still on bail: he has spent about half his life in various forms of U. S. and Canadian state custody. Yet the white heat of controversy over his debatable childhood treason, his penal treatment, and his ceaseless legal railroading has not dwindled one degree.
Conservative politicians still treat Khadr as an unhanged Lord Haw- Haw, hoping cynically to squeeze votes out of every ounce of additional freedom Canadian courts grant him. Some commentators still behave as though Khadr, who generally appears in public looking like the manager of a Best Buy, is actually a sleeper agent just waiting for delivery of a suitcase nuke with his name on it.
One wonders how old he will have to grow before this business ceases, and the dire expectations that he will transform into an Islamic-terrorist phoenix are officially falsified. Will it be going on when the clever devil is 40? When he’s 50? There does not seem any possible doubt of it, however he conducts himself.
The intractable problem with Omar Khadr is simply his existence. The politicians who seem to crave (more of ) his blood are, in an under- stand able way, trying to punish the behaviour of his father, and to retroactively abnegate the slack application of dual-citizenship principles that allowed Khadr Sr. to become Canadian while leading a double life as an international terrorist.
No one who has read Sophocles or the Old Testament can fail to recognize the mentality at work here. Omar Khadr is the manifestation of a curse upon the state. His personal activity and his ethical culpability are not really the point.
Khadr’s friends have concentrated on defending him under the law: they are practically concerned with the paramount goal of obtaining his freedom. Lawyers, being lawyers, have all sort of points to make about the procedures under which he has been detained and abused. This is all appropriate and inevitable, but it tends to obscure the basic fact that no one knows for sure whether Khadr threw the most closely- studied grenade in military history —the one that killed U.S. Army medic Sgt. Christopher Speer.
An operations report introduced during Khadr’s American military trial said specifically that the grenade had been thrown by a different combatant who was killed in the fighting. Khadr is said to have confessed to throwing the grenade, while trying to escape a military trial process that would shame a kangaroo, but now insists that he does not remember either way. This is convenient for him, but criminal defendants are allowed to make convenient arguments, and either way, it would be psychologically unusual for Khadr to have a super- clear memory of events immediately before he was blown up and shot.
The U.S. soldier who dodged the blast, ran in, and shot Khadr — in the back, while he was cowering and blinded by shrapnel — did not see who threw the fatal grenade.
I do not second- guess the actions of that soldier, whoever he was. I will happily buy him a beer if he ever wants to come to Canada, introduce himself, and drink one. It is the Khadrfrenzy crowd, and not Khadr’s supporters, who seem to own magic glasses that can see through time and penetrate the fog of war.
They state confidently, as a fact, that Khadr was personally caught using violence against Canadian allies. This proposition seems untried by any forensic method we would expect to receive the benefit of, ourselves, if we had returned fire against Canadian police in a no-knock raid. ( The evidence of Khadr’s lifestyle in Afghanistan suggests, on the whole, that he was being treated more like a female domestic servant than a su- perwarrior until the eve of the gunfight.)
Maybe you believe, to a moral certainty, that he threw the grenade. Maybe you accept as an article of faith that this grenade was ontologically different from the ones flying in the other direction; maybe you believe that Khadr deserves to be treated as if he had been a responsible, independent adult at that time. That is a fair amount of compounded confidence. But even granting all of that, don’t the legal traditions of Canada and the United States, whose courts have both condemned the regime under which he was tried and held, still require him to be given some credit for time served in an extranational torture shop?
Indeed, wouldn’t a nonlegal idea of common justice require it? I am not a Christian, so I won’t invoke mercy. That concept does not seem necessary to the argument. But I do notice that no one seems very interested in adding it.