Uh I'm winning

He was tortured how again and by whom? I keep getting conflicting details. So everyone we don't hand over to you gets 10MM? Why didn't he sue the US?

So how did the US torture him along with his countrymen? And torturing someone would not have happened at Gitmo

He got 10MM for sleep deprivation? You have to be fucking kidding me.

So Canada's choice was have a citizen continue to be detained on a prison island speciously or bring him home to serve his time in Canada. I actually think your government made the right decision with that Faustian choice and your court system fucked it up.

We all know you're feeling some oats, what with Duffy and Forge out of the forum, but there's no need for you to take over as the forum blowhard.

The issue/choice was not to bring him home to serve his time. The issue is that he never got an actual trial to begin with. You don't serve time without having been tried in a court of law, at least not in a civilized democratic nation supposedly based on rule of law. He was held without trial, finally convicted/pled guilty in front of a military commission, and his imprisonment and "conviction" have been widely criticized by the UN and a whole slew of human rights organizations. He's the first person since WWII to have been convicted of war crimes as a minor by a military court. Maybe he was tortured or maybe not, it's really beside the point. His right to fair trial was withheld from him, and his own government participated in the denial of his rights.

Here's the problem. If he had been properly arrested and tried, with testimony that wasn't subject to so much doubt, and held in conditions that comport with those of most law abiding civilized nations, he might have been convicted and served the rest of his life in prison. Instead, we tried to cut corners, and now he'll be free and he'll get money because he was denied his fundamental rights as a citizen of Canada.

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Slowguy

(insert pithy phrase here...)

Yes. Precisely. All of this.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Why don't you read about what happened to him?

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Perfectly said. The Canadian government embarassed itself in how this child was treated, but people refuse to see that point. This will be the ultimate case study in how NOT to treat your own citizens held in foreign prisons.

If I see Omar on the streets of Edmonton, I will shake his hand and wish him well.

He got 10MM for sleep deprivation? You have to be fucking kidding me.

You seem to want to push an agenda without really making an attempt to understand.

The Supreme Court here ruled in 2010 wrote the following;

"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. Canada's participation in the illegal process in place at Guantanamo Bay clearly violated Canada's binding international obligations,"

This was also reported.

For three weeks ahead of an interview with a Foreign Affairs official in 2004, Khadr was subjected to the, "frequent flyer program" a method of sleep deprivation in which Khadr was moved to a different cell every three hours. The court said the Canadian official knew about this before conducting the interview. Sleep deprivation is widely viewed as a form of torture. Indeed, members of the Canadian Forces are prohibited from using sleep deprivation as a tactic of interrogation.

So, you get a 15-year old they think tossed a grenade, arrest him, using different tactics to get an admission of guilt, and then throw him in prison for 10 years without a chance to defend himself.

That's not quite the same as saying he gets $10 million for sleep deprivation.

The Marines that I've talked to that have done time at GitMo paint a picture somewhat at odds with the "torture" idea. The picture they paint is one where the inmates are kept in comfort. They are totally micromanaged, under constant scrutiny, and everything is video taped. The inmates came from one of the more inhospitable environments known on Earth and are kept in Western style comfort. One guy retold an anecdote where folks got their asses in a sling re. reports of "torture" via lawyers and human rights orgs that have access to the prisoners. The "torture" turned out to be a reference to air conditioning.

I agree that given the kid's age when he was taken to Afghanistan and then picked up, he wouldn't have had any choice in the matter. But there's millions of entirely innocent kids dealing with huge hardship, in the world every year, many of them dying. If I have to choose which of those to be especially sympathetic towards, a kid that was engaged in a fight with US military forces is really low on the list.

The discussion of civilian trials and established guilt, in those environments of careful evidence rules and a presumption of innocence, is lost on me. Imagine your kid is in some 3rd world shithole risking their life every day trying to keep the local shitheads at bay so the families in the area can raise their kids in relative safety. Your kid gets in a firefight with those shitheads. Buddies of your kid go down, those shitheads are doing their level best to kill your kid. These are not abstract ideas, it's your kid. Unlike most current world military orgs, and ALL military orgs going back thousands of years, the Americans don't kill all the enemy combatants, instead they take some prisoners and send them to quite comfort at GitMo. Sure, their life there isn't rich, but they're alive. The alternative really is "not alive".

They were enemy combatants in a fight where bad guys don't really "surrender" in the classic WW2 sense. Think of every one of them as a guy that was trying to kill your kid, as that kid stood in the way of bad guys and local families just trying to raise their kids. But we're Americans, and we try incredibly hard not to kill a bad guy if circumstances allow. But we perceived those bad guys as long term threats and as potential intelligence sources. So we built a comfortable prison for them.

Yes, shitty things happen. Kids that had a lot of bad luck end up stuck in no-win situations where they actively engage in evil. But our compassion is finite. We should pour that compassion on entirely innocent kids, not the kids that have "some" innocence.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

noble effort, mate, but i think you could have stopped there.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

The Canadian government embarrassed itself by granting his father citizenship apparently.

He certainly had access to lawyers, doctors and a priest (muslim) from what I can gather from the Wiki page - which is a jumbled mess and one of the worst I've seen.

Also I love how all the Americans are getting on the Canucks' case for excessive lawsuit damages. Shameless!

Lucky for him that he was Canadian. His father chose well to come to Canada first and get citizenship. I wander how would things play out if he would have been, say, Pakistani or Saudi citizen. Would he dare/bother to sue them? But, Canada is always a soft target, human rights, charter of rights, lawyers etc etc and it was probably his lawyers idea to sue and cash in. Wander how much his lawyer made? Why couldn't the Canadian government pay his education if he so wants to be a nurse? Also wander who will hire him and what would it be like to work with a multimillionaire while everybody around you struggles to make ends meet.
Is there anything to stop foreign jihadis from coming to Canada, get citizenship and then go away to fight, surrender/get captured and if the Canadian government doesn't bail you out pronto sue them and money will flow.

Ad Muncher

Pretty good idea. You make it sound like it's frivolous to have your citizenship rights (and human rights) stomped all over.


Yes. Enough with the histrionics.

Khadr's lawyer has worked pro bono since Day 1. He gave a speech recently on how he came to be Khadr's lawyer, and the circumstances of his first visit to him at Guantanamo Bay. Hardly housed in comfort, contrary to the claims of a previous post. Comfort does not include being chained to the floor.

http://www.cbc.ca/...omar-khadr-1.3961508

An hour of very interesting insights into what drove his lawyer to take on the case and never give up on taking the Canadian government to task.

Why histrionics? When people figured that you can get citizenship and residency in western countries just because your baby is born there many took advantage of that. And they still do as birthing tourism is popular in Canada. Back in 1960 there were thousands of marriages of convenience in West Europe. Marry an escort, get residency, divorce the escort. There are thousands of Canadians in Middle East who use Canadian citizenship as a safety net, never intending to live in Canada. During some of the past Arab-Israeli conflict many of these Canadians were protesting and complaining that Canada didn't rescue them fast enough, they suffered etc. Should we pay them too?

Ad Muncher

Is there anything to stop foreign jihadis from coming to Canada, get citizenship and then go away to fight, surrender/get captured and if the Canadian government doesn't bail you out pronto sue them and money will flow.


Since the lawsuit and settlement had nothing to do with the Canadian government not bailing him out, I guess we'll have to wait to see if something like that ever happens to know for sure.

One thing I've learned is that it's ok to stomp on rights of people if they aren't you. Or perhaps if they aren't like you.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

youre right. We should torture these fuckers and let them be held without trial. That's the right thing to do. Especially if they are minors.

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How does Danny Hart sit down with balls that big?

Sometimes a guy needs to be chained to the floor. Except for it's earliest months, GitMo was under a microscope at all times. At every level of supervision, your career was toast if you were caught being harsher to an inmate then what was spelled out in detail. So maybe he was chained to protect visitors, maybe he was chained because he had a tendency to be violent, I've no idea.

In general terms, we should all have the same reaction as you....being reflexively sympathetic to another. But this isn't a general situation. The unit that got into a fight with his group of terrorist assholes decided that he was a participant. At that point, sympathy mostly gone.

An argument could be made that a huge fraction of terrorists from 3rd world countries didn't have much of a choice. Often they are victims of a constant drumbeat of falsehoods designed to turn them into a weapon. The grade schools that Palestinian kids attend, for example, are chock full of lies and vitriol re. Israel so extreme as to be cartoonish. What chance does some little Afghan kid have, born into a tribal group beholden to a terrorist warlord looking to protect his poppy fields?

We perceive this story of the Canadian kid dragged into evil before he could make his own choices as both unusual, and also terribly sad, and want to absolve him of guilt. When in fact, the idea of a malleable young kid dragged towards evil is common as dirt. Large fractions of the world are a really shitty place, because....people.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart

Bingo! Go google what his oldman has done and the hatred the old lady has spewed out . Not hard to imagine her salivating at the mouth with glee every time a terrorist blows himself up somewhere around the world. Then watch the CBC interview with Khader the other night where he implies he is still involved with them..'they are still my family' etc. So what??..... presumably he will be free to share the loot with his parents?!.Ok then..Fucking joke - (and this is the opinion of a left of centre Canadian liberal :) so can only imagine how the poor cons in this country must be dealing with this ..lol

Yes, there are awful societies in our world with a much occurrences of everyday evil, permeating to even the youngest members of those societies. Some might call those circumstances barbaric.

In the Western society you and I call home and so appreciate, that's not our experience. More importantly, we've made the choice to live by different standards and apply them throughout the ways our societies do business -- governed by a rule of law that assumes innocence and says we have the right to fair trials to prove anything otherwise.

We haven't made the choice that those units on the ground get to decide guilt or innocence outside of that. They can gather & provide evidence to support a case and trial, but the trial rules.

Unfortunately that didn't take place here. So we can't decide that we're not barbaric because we provide for fair trials and then go ahead and do something that is barbaric by not providing that fair trial; that's as problematic as the societies whose values we believe are inferior to our own. If Western values are to be compelling and meaningful, we have to make the choice to live by them consistently. Failure to do so not only cheapens all of us, but emboldens those we call enemies.

In that light, it sounds as if the settlement was the only just action.

The difference is that you see him as a criminal. I don't. In our civil world, our opponent, in this context, is criminals. To curb them we have and system designed to both protect their rights and also protect society by deterring and rehabilitating those criminals. In war we have enemy combatants, otherwise decent types that have managed to get (earn?) themselves politicians that don't like our politicians, as a result we and our buddies are trying to kill them and their buddies. Nothing personal, just another tragic and disappointing aspect of humanity.

Then we have the terrorists. I imagine my son in that 3rd world shit hole risking his life every day to stand between the innocent families of that country trying to live a normal life, and the terrorist scum that would kill them. I perceive terrorists as vastly worse than the enemy combatant, and orders of magnitude worse than the criminal.

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Books @ Amazon
"If only he had used his genius for niceness, instead of Evil." M. Smart