Omar Khadr to get settlement

What's happening in your world? Discuss it here.
Forum rules
Play nice. We will be watching

Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby blehblah » Wed Jul 05, 2017 2:19 am

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/omar-kh ... -1.4189472

When word of the government's multimillion-dollar settlement with Omar Khadr was first reported Monday night, Jason Kenney, the former defence minister, was quick to condemn.

"This confessed terrorist should be in prison paying for his crimes, not profiting from them at the expense of Canadian taxpayers," Kenney tweeted.

That much is consistent with a Conservative government that resisted repatriating Khadr, opposed his release on bail and might still be fighting Khadr's lawsuit if it were still in office.

[snip Kenney's tweet]

For a counterpoint — and for a hint that a settlement was perhaps inevitable — one can turn to the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling on Jan. 29, 2010, that found Khadr's human rights were being violated at Guantanamo Bay.


From a different perspective:

http://nationalpost.com/g00/opinion/chr ... gle.com%2F

It certainly seems that despite his life thus far – being raised in what was a death-worshipping cult, which is to say his jihadist Afghan-Canadian family, and then 13 years spent in custody in Guantanamo Bay and Canada — Omar Khadr is doing all right, Jack.

Since being released on bail two years ago, he lived for a time with his lawyer, Dennis Edney, and his wife Patricia, now has his own place in Edmonton, and is apparently planning to start nursing school in the fall.


The Wikipedia page on Kadr is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr, and opens with:

Omar Ahmed Sayid Khadr (born September 19, 1986) is a Canadian who was detained at Guantanamo Bay as a minor and held there for 10 years. In a firefight during the United States invasion of Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, in the village of Ayub Kheyl, in which several Taliban fighters were killed, Khadr, not yet 16, was severely wounded.[1] After being detained at Bagram, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. During his detention, he was interrogated by Canadian as well as US intelligence officers. He was imprisoned for throwing a grenade during the firefight that resulted in the death of an American soldier. At the time, he was 15 years old and had been brought to Afghanistan by his father, who was affiliated with an extreme religious group.



EDIT: Fixed the spelling of Khadr's name in the subject
  • 6

Last edited by blehblah on Wed Jul 05, 2017 2:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.
User avatar
blehblah
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3895
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 9:16 pm
Show rep
Title: Error General, Panic Colonel

Re: Omar Kadhr to get settlement

Postby Absentia » Wed Jul 05, 2017 3:19 am

So that's around a million dollars per year he was at Gitmo. Doesn't sound like enough, frankly. I know you'd have to offer me more than one mil to spend a year there.
  • 8

User avatar
Absentia
TCS Moderator
TCS Moderator
 
Posts: 1786
Joined: Mon Feb 09, 2015 4:46 am
Location: Earth
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby blehblah » Wed Jul 05, 2017 2:10 pm

He was a child soldier, in every respect. There are also wider issues about whether or not tossing a grenade at soldiers who are attacking you is defensible. The whole point of Guantanamo Bay and the 'enemy combatant' designation was to bypass both the US judicial system and Geneva Conventions. Were he considered a soldier (child or otherwise) it would not be a crime, basically. Finally, thanks to the nature of the trials military tribunals and commissions, it is not at all clear if Khadr did kill anyone. At this point, he may very-well not know.

That's all well and good, but it could be argued it was not Canada's problem... except the Supreme Court disagreed, and not in a light fashion.

Wikipedia wrote:Khadr's defence attorneys claimed that the Canadian government acted illegally, sending its counsel and CSIS agents to Guantanamo Bay to interrogate Khadr and turning their findings over to the Tribunal prosecutors to help convict Khadr,[157] and that the release of the documents might help prove Khadr's innocence.[63] In 2007, the Federal Court of Appeal ordered the Canadian government to turn over its records related to Khadr's time in captivity, as judge Richard Mosley stated it was apparent that Canada had violated international law.[73] The government appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2008, arguing that Khadr was just "fishing" for information and that disclosing their records, which included an initial account of the firefight that differs from all previously seen reports,[158] could jeopardise national security.[159] Critics alleged that the refusal to release the classified documents was due to the "embarrassment" they caused the government.[159][160]

On May 23, 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that the government had acted illegally, contravening s. 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and ordered the videotapes of the interrogation released.[161]

In April 2009, the Federal Court of Canada ruled again that Khadr's rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been violated. It concluded that Canada had a "duty to protect" Khadr and ordered the Canadian government to request that the U.S. return him to Canada as soon as possible.[162] In August 2009, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the decision in a 2–1 ruling.[163] Finally, in January 2010, in a unanimous 9–0 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the participation of Canadian officials in Khadr's interrogations at Guantanamo clearly violated his rights under the Charter. In its sharply worded decision, the Supreme Court referred to the denial of Khadr's legal rights as well as to the use of sleep deprivation techniques to soften him up for interrogation:

The deprivation of [Khadr's] right to liberty and security of the person is not in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. The interrogation of a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.

But, the Supreme Court stopped short of ordering the government to seek Khadr's return to Canada. It left it to the government to determine how to exercise its duty to conduct foreign affairs while also upholding its obligation to respect Khadr's constitutional rights.


I find opinion's like Christie Blatchford's (linked in the original post) rather cross-eyed. It boils down to:

He has plenty of supporters in this country and more of a shot at a fresh start than many of those who walk away from prison with nothing and absolutely no one in their corner.

Why isn’t that enough? Why can’t Khadr be content with what he has been given, and the rest of us with knowing that if he wasn’t always treated perfectly, he now enjoys freedom?


In the same opinion piece, Blatchford mentions more than once that the 'legal' process Khadr was subjected to was bunk. Yet, it concludes by basically declaring Khadr deserves the same treatment as any other criminal who has gone through the Canadian justice system. That's bullshit, and the 'why' behind the twisted logic is made clear in the same opinion piece:

If nothing else, at the very least, it’s a brilliant victory for the Taliban, al-Qaida, ISIL and all the other extremists: A young jihadist is now a hero in Canada for killing an infidel – and look, he got a big payday and an apology to boot.


If Blatchford's point is that the Canadian justice system clings to punitive punishment, rather than reform, leaving criminals who may otherwise be redeemable up the creek without a paddle, I would tend to agree. The point, though, seems to be that Khadr is a lucky guy, and should be satisfied with being back in Canada, despite the Canadian government's best efforts, and therefore (watch your step, this is quite a logical leap) this result is akin to a "brilliant victory for the Taliban". Sure... the people who behead folks at the drop of a hat (that is some twisted phrasing) will celebrate Canadian justice finally running its proper course after the government failed to protect a Canadian citizen, because he's Omar Khadr. I see what Blatchford is selling, but I ain't buying it.

The next couple paragraphs extend the thrust of Blatchford's column into lunacy via a very greasy slope.

What’s next: Do we apologize to the Germans for winning what another friend calls “those two memorable misunderstandings?”

“We did win both. Tore down the fabric of their society, twice. Killed a lot of their young men. Became an occupying force. Really, really sorry about that.”


I seem to recall quite a few German soldiers being held as prisoners of war and not tortured or tried for murder. I also seem to recall a number of German soldiers and government types being tried for war crimes. In both cases, we on the 'good' side held ourselves to a higher standard than the 'bad' side. Turning to the other major enemy of WWII, we locked-up Japanese folks, and we apologized, forty years later, because it was wrong.

In the end, what I find disturbing is people can't see past 'Khadr is a terrorist and therefore doesn't deserve the same treatment as other Canadians' (he was born in Toronto). Canada cannot abandon its duty to protect its citizens, wherever they are, whomever they are, and whatever they have been accused of, from clearly sub-standard legal processes. Worse, Canada actively participated in this fiasco. That is shameful.
  • 7

A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.
User avatar
blehblah
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3895
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 9:16 pm
Show rep
Title: Error General, Panic Colonel

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby FieldMarshalFry » Wed Jul 05, 2017 7:31 pm

last I checked.... the use of Child Soldiers was a war crime and the children were considered victims, not criminals, and even then, how is attacking an invading army a war crime (regardless of the invasion being justified or not, we were the invading force, in the same way were an invading for during WW2)?
  • 7

Supreme Commander of the Imperial Royal Cracked Army (also The Comments Section Militia), currently commanding the retake of the Troll Mines of 4chan in World Internet War 1, direct superior to Major. General Obvious, General Ignorance and General Knowledge.
User avatar
FieldMarshalFry
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 1505
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2015 3:30 am
Show rep
Title: Field Marshal of TCS

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Kivutar » Wed Jul 05, 2017 8:47 pm

FieldMarshalFry wrote:last I checked.... the use of Child Soldiers was a war crime and the children were considered victims, not criminals


B8S86rCCEAIqP1e.png
B8S86rCCEAIqP1e.png (209.42 KiB) Viewed 3299 times
  • 9

Then the LORD said to me, "Go again, love a woman who is loved by her husband, yet an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes."

Hosea 3:1
User avatar
Kivutar
Champion
Champion
 
Posts: 1425
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2015 3:52 am
Location: Right behind you
Show rep
Title: Great Librarian

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Marcuse » Wed Jul 05, 2017 9:03 pm

I think with the issue of Omar Khadr, as with other detainees in Guantanamo, we have one singular problem. The fact is, these people were held in an extra-judicial detention center, intentionally located off US soil in order to evade the legal rights that the US affords criminals and prisoners of war. They were deliberately placed in a political limbo that prevented them from being brought to trial or treated in the same way as enemy soldiers. While they were incarcerated, they were denied any legal representation and subject to "enhanced interrogation" that really amounts to about as close to torture as you can get without calling it torture.

If we're looking at a settlement for someone imprisoned there, really their case needs rest solely on the fact the US broke or evaded its own laws to keep those people there. They traded freedom for safety, and in the end while some of those people were dangerous, it's been far more damaging politically to be seen to be doing this kind of thing. If the state picked me, or you, up for the possibility that you might be dangerous or because you were forced to do something when you were a child that ended up hurting someone else, you would rightly consider that abhorrent. I don't see why it's different here, and any decision on a settlement should take into account that we didn't afford these people rights when we should have. Regardless of any harm caused, which in Khadr's case appears to be something he shouldn't be legally responsible for, he was then held with no hope of release for a long time. We compensate people who're wrongly convicted on their release, I don't see why this would be different, excepting the increased severity of holding someone for a long time while denying or ignoring their legal rights.
  • 9

User avatar
Marcuse
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 6592
Joined: Tue Apr 16, 2013 8:00 pm
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Windy » Wed Jul 05, 2017 10:47 pm

This is hilarious because the next time a terrorist attack happens and it turns out the person has a history of hanging out with terrorists and the government did nothing we're all going to blame the government.
  • 1

User avatar
Windy
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3127
Joined: Fri May 29, 2015 11:41 am
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby FieldMarshalFry » Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:23 pm

how unsurprising.... Windy supports people being thrown in illegal prisons without trial, a shred of evidence against them, or having actually committed any crimes....
  • 5

Supreme Commander of the Imperial Royal Cracked Army (also The Comments Section Militia), currently commanding the retake of the Troll Mines of 4chan in World Internet War 1, direct superior to Major. General Obvious, General Ignorance and General Knowledge.
User avatar
FieldMarshalFry
TCS Sithlord
TCS Sithlord
 
Posts: 1505
Joined: Sun Feb 15, 2015 3:30 am
Show rep
Title: Field Marshal of TCS

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Windy » Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:36 pm

how unsurprising... fieldmarshalfry sympathizes with terrorists.
  • 1

User avatar
Windy
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3127
Joined: Fri May 29, 2015 11:41 am
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby blehblah » Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:43 pm

Windy wrote:This is hilarious because the next time a Slytherin attack happens and it turns out a Slytherin has a history of hanging out with Slytherin and the Ministry of Magic did nothing we're all going to blame the Ministry of Magic.


Image
  • 9

A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.
User avatar
blehblah
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3895
Joined: Sun Apr 14, 2013 9:16 pm
Show rep
Title: Error General, Panic Colonel

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby SandTea » Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:47 pm

FieldMarshalFry wrote:how unsurprising....


I don't mean to single you out, this is just convenient.

Why the hell do you people still engage? I get listening to opposing viewpoints is a big deal but you know damn well he(?) is not looking for a conversation.
  • 5

"Draw me not without reason; sheath me not without honor."
User avatar
SandTea
Time Waster
Time Waster
 
Posts: 1257
Joined: Sun Mar 15, 2015 5:01 pm
Show rep
Title: 3rdAeolus

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Absentia » Thu Jul 06, 2017 12:01 am

Windy wrote:This is hilarious because the next time a terrorist attack happens and it turns out the person has a history of hanging out with terrorists and the government did nothing we're all going to blame the government.


Ignoring the fact that this isn't really relevant to what we're talking about: some people will blame the government, but mostly the same people who would have blamed the government anyway. The only governments I blame for terrorism are the ones that actively promote it.
  • 5

User avatar
Absentia
TCS Moderator
TCS Moderator
 
Posts: 1786
Joined: Mon Feb 09, 2015 4:46 am
Location: Earth
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Windy » Thu Jul 06, 2017 12:06 am

blehblah wrote:
Windy wrote:This is hilarious because the next time a Slytherin attack happens and it turns out a Slytherin has a history of hanging out with Slytherin and the Ministry of Magic did nothing we're all going to blame the Ministry of Magic.


Spoiler: show
Image


Have you ever considered not forming all of your political opinions based on a children's fantasy book?
  • 1

User avatar
Windy
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3127
Joined: Fri May 29, 2015 11:41 am
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Krashlia » Thu Jul 06, 2017 12:32 am

FieldMarshalFry wrote:how unsurprising.... Windy supports people being thrown in illegal prisons without trial, a shred of evidence against them, or having actually committed any crimes....


The military imprisonment i think i would overlook. But I would think a trial afterwards is just fair and right.
  • 1

User avatar
Krashlia
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 2155
Joined: Mon Feb 09, 2015 6:44 am
Show rep

Re: Omar Khadr to get settlement

Postby Windy » Thu Jul 06, 2017 12:43 am

FieldMarshalFry wrote:last I checked.... the use of Child Soldiers was a war crime and the children were considered victims, not criminals, and even then, how is attacking an invading army a war crime (regardless of the invasion being justified or not, we were the invading force, in the same way were an invading for during WW2)?


I love how this terrorist whitewashing post gets all of these upvotes and people still act like they have no idea why someone might think they're terrorist sympathizers. Last I checked he volunteered to join al Queda, and they're an unlawful terrorist organization that totally doesn't represent their country and most of the people from these countries are totally not terrorist sympathizers and actually hate al queda and want to get rid of them, so how are we invading them?
  • 2

User avatar
Windy
TCS Junkie
TCS Junkie
 
Posts: 3127
Joined: Fri May 29, 2015 11:41 am
Show rep

Next

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 24 guests