And then there’s this one, which makes me so angry I’m not sure I can even write coherently about it.
A day after a report revealed Canadian officials knew of Omar Khadr’s harsh treatment by the U.S. military, Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Thursday repeated vows to leave the case in U.S. hands.
…
A Canadian official visiting Khadr in 2004 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was told the U.S. military was depriving the then 17-year-old of sleep for weeks to make him “more amenable and willing to talk,” according to a newly released internal report from the Foreign Affairs Department.
“Canada has sought assurances that Mr. Khadr, under our government, will be treated humanely. We are monitoring those legal processes very carefully.”
Canada “frankly has no real alternative” to the U.S. legal process, he went on to say.
So, the US took a kid, a Canadian kid, to their special extralegal prison, have tortured
I don’t think so Mr. Harper. We should be mortified as a nation that our government knew this was happening and didn’t do everything in it’s power to stop it. We certainly can’t say “oh well, water under the bridge, and I’m sure it’s much better now”. Every other Western national has been out of Gitmo for a while now–the only one left is the child.
And I don’t understand how he can even say that with a straight face when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled, years ago, that the conditions at Gitmo were unacceptable by Canadian Constitutional standards–a ruling the outlawed any further Canadian participation in activities and interrogations there. Or considering a federal court judge ruled last week that the treatment was a violation of international human rights.
And now we’re hearing details of the “interrogation methods” and seeing videos of the interrogations, and finally Canadians are apparently starting to care about this. It is nice to hear the Liberals saying “knowing what we know now, we should bring him back to Canada” with the implicit “our decision not to fight for him when were were in power was wrong”. It’s even nicer to hear the NDP call it “disgraceful”, and to have them (finally!) call for some oversight of CSIS.
You might expect a minority government to care about the will of the people on an issue like this, but not Mr. Harper.
You know what I’d like? A government that didn’t condone the torture of prisoners (especially, but not only, children), that didn’t condone extra-legal prisons, that encouraged supposedly friendly nations to actually, you know, try someone they think is guilty of a crime and either convict them or let them go. A government that respected the ideas of due process and civil liberties. Especially, you know, in the case of a minor.
Actually the only entity that has done things to be proud of in this affair are the courts–the Canadian courts have made decision after decision that seem sensible and correct, despite government pressure. The ruling mentioned above, and the ones that required CSIS to turn their information over to Kadr’s defense team, among others, stand out as examples.
I was discussing this with some Americans today at work and I ran into the “well, he killed an American soldier, he deserves it” thing. I couldn’t argue it without entering into unprofessional behaviour, but you know, if you can prove that he did kill a soldier, then try him and sentence him. You don’t torture him for six years. And even if he did it, and you find him guilty–you can’t condone the torture of prisoners. Period.
A teenage kid who kills a cop doesn’t get six years of torture before his day in court. And of course, he might not have actually done it. How many successful convictions so far of the people held at Gitmo? And…
Prosecutors say Khadr, then 15, threw the grenade, but other documents have suggested it was an adult militant who killed Speer, or that he was shot by a member of his own platoon.
and
In February 2008, the Pentagon accidentally released documents that revealed that although Khadr was present during the firefight, there was no other evidence that he had thrown the grenade. In fact, military officials had originally reported that another of the surviving militants had thrown the grenade just before being killed. (source)
Sure might be nice to prove the crime before the punishment starts. Not, you know, after six years of torture.
And, let’s be honest, at this point (hell, long before this point) the idea that there is any kind of acceptable legal process at work in Guantanamo is a joke. And Mr. Harper either knows that, or he’s even dumber than I think he is.
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