Omar Khadr 'happy to be home,' says lawyer

[magedragonfire]

After years of detention at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Omar Khadr has returned to Canada to serve the rest of his sentence at a maximum security facility in eastern Ontario and is reported by his lawyers to be ‘happy to be home.’Khadr landed at CFB Trenton Saturday morning where he was transferred, in shackles, to the Millhaven

Comments

[tabaqui]

I'm confused. How is killing someone in a firefight and throwing a grenade during a war something you go to prison for? Most of our military should be in prison if these are 'illegal actions'.

Doing that on a civilian street or in a school or something, yes, but - while two opposing forces are trading gunfire?

I am baffled.

Gitmo is a blight, a stain, a revolting and shameful blot on humanity and every day it holds prisoners is a bad day. Of all the things the President has done and not done, this is the one that I am most angry about. I know that it's not 100 percent on his head, but i really feel he could have tried harder on this.

I hope he does in his second term.

[redstar826]

I'm confused. How is killing someone in a firefight and throwing a grenade during a war something you go to prison for?

That's what I don't get. I think it's pretty normal for both sides in a war to try to take prisoners if they have the chance to do so, but this idea of charging prisoners of war with a crime and then sentencing them for a set amount of time is confusing to me. Plus all the added issues of him being a child soldier as opposed to an adult who was not forced to fight.

[tabaqui]

Yeah, all this. Especially the child-soldier bit. No child willingly goes to war, and no child willingly kills. He should *never* have been charged with anything to begin with.

It's as obscene as if they were charging those boys in Africa who were kidnapped into the Army.

[maynardsong]

It's as obscene as if they were charging those boys in Africa who were kidnapped into the Army.

Exactly. That's exactly what came to my mind.

But no child willingly kills? Child soldiers are brainwashed into doing horrific things that they DO learn to take pleasure in though. It is one of the challenges to reintegration, dealing with the fact that they're both victims and perpetrators.

[tabaqui]

I think the key here is 'brainwashed'. That's not a willing act, and anyone acting under that kind of deliberate mental instability isn't doing it 'willingly', but because they have been conditioned to.

If i'm remembering correctly, the African boy-soldiers were also addicted to drugs, deliberately, to make them easier to control. I wonder if this young man went through something similar with maybe fasting or a meager diet, as cults sometimes do, to make him more malleable.

[maynardsong]

It's entirely possible. But what I'm getting at is that people want to think of kids as innocent and fluffy and pure. And yeah, they were brainwashed, but in rehabilitating child soldiers, you CAN'T think of them that way.

[tabaqui]

No, children aren't all 'innocent and fluffy', but killing while under the influence of having been kidnapped, coerced and/or brainwashed is not 'willing', no matter how much 'pleasure' they seem to get out of it at any point.

I don't have any idea how the 'Lost Boys', as i think they were called, are rehabilitated.

[maynardsong]

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that I think a lot of people might have trouble coming to terms that child soldiers are victims and perpetrators at the same time, and actually (tangent time) I think it's somewhat similar to many people's attitudes towards victims of sexual and gender based violence, this idea that victims, of whichever crime, have to be pure and fluffy.

[tabaqui]

I get what you're saying but i never said anybody WAS pure and fluffy. Regardless of whatever acts of war this man committed - and frankly, i find any confession from a 15 year old obtained under torture and interrogation to be *highly* suspect - I do not agree with him being charged for any of his actions. At all.

Has nothing to do with him being 'innocent' and everything to do with him being manipulated.

[maynardsong]

I get that. I agree with you wholeheartedly. This was just me speculating on what's going on in the heads of those who dealt with the kid in an entirely inappropriate way.

[tabaqui]

I think 'because terror!!' and 'we have to do something!!!' was all that was in their heads. Results and scapegoats.

[lurkch]

I think it has something to do with not being part of nation's military. I'm not sure which of the international treaties/laws covers this, but that's my guess.