Condemnations reek of double standards
Fourteen years after Stephen Harper and Stockwell Day penned their proclamation of support for the illegal invasion of Iraq in the Wall Street Journal, another Canadian politician took to the WSJ to valorize another American contravention of international law: the abuse of Omar Khadr.
Conservative foreign affairs critic Peter Kent’s op-ed excoriated the Canadian government’s settlement with Khadr: an apology and reported $10.5 million in compensation, for Canada’s many years of complicity in Khadr’s imprisonment and torture in the legal black hole called Guantanamo Bay.
“This payout was a cynical subversion of Canadian principles,” Kent fulminated. Tea Party activist and former Republican leadership candidate Herman Cain agreed, condemning the settlement on Fox News as a “pathetic interpretation of the law.”
These castigations of the Khadr settlement reverse reality. It is not Canada’s compensation to Omar Khadr that is a “cynical subversion” and “pathetic interpretation of the law,” but the U.S.’s manipulation of legal processes to punish Khadr for his alleged misdeeds while routinely ignoring its own.
Khadr was charged in the Guantanamo military commissions with “murder in violation of the law of war,” for the death of U.S. Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer (who has misleadingly been described as a “medic”) — but killing an enemy soldier in combat is not a war crime. The prosecution asserted that Khadr violated the laws of war because he was an “unlawful combatant” — a civilian acting as a soldier — in the firefight in which Speer was killed.
By that standard, the CIA should also be considered guilty of war crimes, for committing “murder” as an “unlawful combatant.” “No less than their insurgent targets, (CIA agents) are fighters without uniforms or insignia, directly participating in hostilities, employing armed force contrary to the laws and customs of war,” writes law professor and marine veteran Gary Solis.
CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen have not only killed people the U.S. claimed were militants, but also untold scores of civilians; civilians like Mamana Bibi, a 68-year-old woman who was obliterated in front of her grandchildren while picking vegetables in North Waziristan.
“Under the legal theories adopted by our government in prosecuting Guantanamo detainees, these CIA officers (involved in the drone program) . . . are committing war crimes,” observed international law professor and former Navy officer David Glazier.
But unlike Omar Khadr, the architects and executors of the CIA drone program have not been penalized as war criminals. Quite the contrary — their powers have been increased by President Trump.
The U.S. has also largely failed to prosecute the torture and killing of thousands of Afghan civilians by American forces since 2001. To pick just one massacre out of many: no one has been brought to justice for the U.S.’s 2015 bombing of a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, which killed 42 civilians; hospital staff were decapitated by shrapnel, while immobile patients burned alive in their beds.
The U.S. conducted an internal investigation into the bombing (under pressure from MSF) and exonerated itself of war crimes, by claiming its transgressions of the laws of war were not “intentional” — a much higher threshold for guilt than it applies to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where acts that are merely negligent can qualify as war crimes.
“The U.S. government surely can’t have it both ways,” remark law professors Ryan Goodman and Steve Vladeck.
If Omar Khadr is a “terrorist” and a “murderer” for killing one American soldier, what does that make those responsible for the deaths of so many civilians?
And if the family of Christopher Speer deserves compensation, don’t families bereaved by the “war on terror” deserve compensation too?
Sgt. Speer’s widow was awarded $134 million (U.S.) against Omar Khadr on the strength of Khadr’s torture-extracted “confession” to murdering her husband — even while U.S. courts have steadfastly blocked lawsuits by those on the receiving end of American violence.
Instead, the U.S. offers “condolence payments,” without any admission of wrongdoing, for a fraction of the civilians it kills or injures. In Afghanistan, the average payment for a death between 2011 and 2013 was $3,426; the U.S. gave $6,000 for each person it killed in the hospital in Kunduz.
Fourteen years after the invasion of Iraq, that war is widely acknowledged as a debacle that breached international prohibitions against aggression. Canadian politicians should have learned this lesson from Iraq: Those who side with American might over international right are not judged kindly by history.