| Submit your comments on this article |
| Great White North |
| Omar Khadr is a traitor to Canada at best |
| 2008-07-28 |
| by Charles W. Moore I would like to see Omar Khadr get his day in court, and justice be finally served, for the widow and children of the man he's accused of murdering as well as for Khadr himself. It bears noting that had it not been for legal wrangling initiated by Mr. Khadr's counsel, he would likely have been tried and the matter dispensed with before now. Unfortunately, Khadr's lawyers, enthusiastically abetted by most of Canada's lefty media, have done their damnedest to turn the Khadr affair into a matter of politics rather than justice, with monotonous references to him as a "child soldier," rote allegations of "torture (torture lite?)," and the calculatedly inflammatory release of heavily-edited video excerpts from CSIS interviews with Khadr at Guantanamo Bay where he's been imprisoned for six years. If you've been vacationing incognito on the dark side of the moon, Toronto-born Khadr, now aged 21, was shot and captured on July 27, 2002, at the age of 15 by U.S. forces at Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan, after an engagement with Taliban/al Qaeda insurgents, and is alleged to have killed U.S. Army medic Sgt. Christopher Speer with a grenade. Omar's father, Ahmad, a lieutenant and financier of Osama bin Laden, moved his family from Toronto to Pakistan in the mid 1990s to join the anti-Western jihad, and was killed by security forces in 2003. According to a 2002 report by the Boston Globe's Colin Nickerson, U.S. troops, patrolling with Pashtun militia encountered a group of armed insurgents. After a 45 minute negotiation, the insurgents suddenly opened fire and chucked grenades, killing two militiamen, and blinding U.S. Sergeant Layne Morris in one eye. The Americans radioed for close air support, initiating a four hour bombardment of the insurgents' position with rockets, bombs, and cannon fire. When that finished, a ground party cautiously advanced. Sergeant Speer, a medic who reportedly had recently risked his life to rescue two injured Afghan children from a minefield, entered the bombed-out enemy compound seeking wounded, at which point a lone survivor of the air attack, Omar Khadr, allegedly crawled out of the rubble with pistol in hand and lobbed a grenade, wounding Sgt. Speer, who died 11 days later. American soldiers returned fire, wounding Omar twice in the chest. He fared better than Sgt. Speer, and was shipped to Guantanamo upon recovery from his wounds. More recently, an alternate version of events based on a classified document quoting an unidentified soldier has been floated by Khadr's advocates contending the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer was thrown during the heat of battle, that a second jihadi was still alive when it was thrown, and that Khadr was already wounded, making the second militant (who later died) a more likely culprit. That sort of controversy needs sorting out at trial, but I have problems with the revisionist version, which seems implausible or self-contradictory on several counts. Sgt. Morris, who was actually there, insists Mr. Khadr must have thrown the grenade because he was the only one left alive in the compound, telling the National Post last week: "my lasting image of Omar is of him crouched in the rubble waiting for U.S. troops to get close enough so he could take one of them out, and he did that successfully. . ." Sgt. Morris told CBC Radio's The Current that suggestion of a second survivor was "a surprise. . . . I talked to almost everybody who was in that compound or there that day and none of them mentioned that there was actually two guys alive in there." I'm inclined to believe Sgt. Morris's version, and presumably he'll testify at the trial, which thankfully will be in a U.S. military court, because if Khadr had, for argument's sake, been returned to Canada, tried and convicted of the Speer murder, as a "young offender" he would no doubt already be out of jail. At least if he's found guilty in the U.S., he'll serve hard time without anonymity, rather than being returned to Canada for likely immediate parole -- perhaps even being awarded "compensation." As for Khadr's being Canadian, whatever the facts about the grenade murder, he was in Afghanistan fighting the ISAF coalition of which Canada is part. There's a name for people who take up arms against their country: "traitor." It is legally defined as a Canadian citizen who "assists an enemy at war with Canada, or any armed forces against whom Canadian Forces are engaged in hostilities, whether or not a state of war exists between Canada and the country whose forces they are." If Khadr ever makes it back to Canada, it would be appropriate to immediately charge him with treason. However, Canadian legal experts express doubt that he would be charged with anything at all, which is why he's exactly where he should be. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #2 If we had followed the Geneva Convention, this kid would have been executed as an illegal combatant six years ago. |
| Posted by: Rambler in California 2008-07-28 19:09 |
| #1 The opening line of this piece sounds sort of like Judge Roy Bean: "Were gonna give this man a fair trial, then we're gonna take him out and hang him..." I like that. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2008-07-28 09:41 |