Dear Editor,
With regards to the $10.5 million Omar Khadr settlement, the more one investigates the reasons for the settlement, the more they stink.
The government breached international treaties, human rights obligations, and the rule of law.
A “confession” was extracted by torture of a legal child during 10 years in a prison built outside the reach of U.S. law (that is why Guantanamo Bay is on Cuba) by a military court with military rules for a “crime” created retroactively.
The “murder” of a foreign invading soldier by an “unprivileged belligerent” (huh!) arose in a war-time battle. There is even doubt that Khadr threw the grenade. Never in war history has such a charge been laid.
Khadr was deprived of access to proper legal counsel and Canadian Consular assistance (with the complicity of the Canadian Conservatives).
In such circumstances of torture, most would confess to anything.
This was a classic “kangaroo court”! Calling him a “convicted” murderer or terrorist is breathtakingly cynical.
Now the Conservative Party “leadership” is groveling before the Americans, decrying a damage settlement, due in large part to their complicity in abuses. Why is that?
Sure the settlement is big, but it is for 10 years of Canadian government sanctioned abuse and torture. The courts would probably have awarded much more, if the trial had continued.
How many of us would expose ourselves to that abuse in exchange for that amount of money – probably none.
Fair-minded civilized people should be outraged at the government’s (primarily those same Conservatives) complicity in these abuses!
Ian C. MacLeod
Richmond
