How they see us: Handing over a Canadian jihadist

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.

In this case, the label is apt, said Ezra Levant in the Ottawa Sun. Khadr is no victim. A gleeful warrior for jihad in Afghanistan, he was just a few weeks shy of his 16th birthday when he threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Army Special Forces medic named Christopher Speer. And he never expressed remorse for that murder. While in Guantánamo, he “taunted guards by bragging about killing Speer.” One of the guards “was an African-American woman—three things he hates”-—so he cursed her as a bitch, a slave, and a whore. That’s not the kind of Canadian we should be defending. Instead, we should be enraged at President Obama for “emptying out his prison in our streets.”

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No matter what Khadr has done, said the Toronto Star in an editorial, “he is a Canadian citizen who was effectively abandoned by his own government in the near-hysteria that followed the 9/11 attacks.” Other U.S. allies whose nationals were held in Guantánamo criticized their citizens’ mistreatment and lobbied for their return. Not Canada. We raised no objection as Khadr was tried before “a discredited military tribunal of vengeful enemies.” Khadr has already spent 10 years behind bars—longer than he would have had he been convicted of murder as a 15-year-old here. Now that he’s home, he “deserves parole.”