Omar Khadr - Last Westerner in GBay

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Anyone got any thoughts on this whole multi-year fiasco? The trial finally started this week so hopefully there's a resolution soon.

Regardless of whether or not he's guilty of the crimes he's accused of, I'm damn sure the guys a "terrorizer" now. Eight years in Guantanamo could make anyone become a radical fundamentalist.
 
I can't imagine if instead of going to high school and college I'd been tortured and locked up in Bagram and Guantanamo. It won't surprise me at all if he gets out and goes straight back to Pakistan or Afghanistan and starts blowing shit up.
 
I can't imagine if instead of going to high school and college I'd been tortured and locked up in Bagram and Guantanamo. It won't surprise me at all if he gets out and goes straight back to Pakistan or Afghanistan and starts blowing shit up.

Actually wasn't this a case of instead of going to high school he was in Afghanistan training as a terrorist?
 
Actually wasn't this a case of instead of going to high school he was in Afghanistan training as a terrorist?
I suppose. I was just commenting that he's been locked up from the time he was 15. Of course, he wasn't just training, he killed a US soldier with a grenade.

Also, it's not like he had much of a choice about being in Afghanistan. He wasn't a suburban middle-class teenager in Toronto who decided to leave home and become an insurgent. His father dragged the family around central Asia for most of his life and settled in Jalalabad so he could (iirc) work with bin Laden. Given the environment he grew up in I'm not surprised he became an insurgent.
 
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That's what the whole defense lies on. Making him out to be a terrified 15 year old boy forced into killing.
 
I don't have too many thoughts about this case but it does highlight how once again and likely not the last time how useless CSIS is, another case of how useless Canada's foreign services are and that being a Canadian citizen puts you at the mercy of foreign prosecution guilty or not(Mahar Arar being the most prominent one). Many many other countries provide much better services for their citizens abroad be it the United States, the UK(who managed to get all of their citizens out of Guantanamo) and so on. Its not even a partisan thing, this is probably the most incompetent portion of the federal government that needs real reform in how it even functions its just a lot more cases have happened under this conservative government. The 2004 Tsunami was the big one that make me feel worse about my Canadian passport, where Canadian citizens couldn't get any help or even concern from Canadian officials and relied on American, British and even Hong Kong officials despite having little relations with them. I don't understand why the government is focusing on a surprisingly competent Stats Can, and ignoring the real failed government agency.
 
How does killing a soldier in a war zone during a firefight constitute "terrorism"? Sounds to me like he should be classified as a POW, not an "enemy combatant." A POW on the morally-wrong side of a war, put a POW nevertheless.
 
How does killing a soldier in a war zone during a firefight constitute "terrorism"? Sounds to me like he should be classified as a POW, not an "enemy combatant." A POW on the morally-wrong side of a war, put a POW nevertheless.
The whole "enemy combatant" and "detainment" scheme worked up by Bush's legal hacks is complete bullshit. Illegal under our own laws. Illegal under a number of treaties we've signed. If we want to try him as a terrorist, it needs to be in a civil court, not on a military tribunal. Not that anything will change the government's stance on this; they're not going to give up this kind of power.
 
Indeed. You may not like the Taliban, but I've never been all that crazy about the nazis either, and they were given the advantage of POW status, weren't they. So were the Japs.
 
Bush and his cronies are all pretty misguided souls. They all believe in God (Bush thinks God told him to run), yet fail at all of the best lessons in the Bible. And remember, I am an atheist and say this.
 
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