Up against Dan the PT is, of course, the Yankee-bashing faction, which produces equally tired tropes (all Canadian conservatives are U.S. lackeys, capital punishment is bad for everyone except George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, etc.). Once or twice a day, somebody will post a sensible comment, perhaps pointing out an error of fact, but that’s once or twice out of a hundred or more knee-jerk “opinions.” I read these comments much less than I used to because the whole field seems like the Canadian Parliament in microcosm: a bunch of posturers looking for their three seconds of fame. There is rarely any notion of constructive analysis of another respondent’s views in one of these ripostes: differing opinions are to be mocked, not examined.
One topic that comes up ever more frequently is that of Omar Khadr. This young man – he’s 21 – is the son of Ahmed Said Khadr, who brought the young Omar from Canada to Pakistan where he underwent radical Islamist training. The father was later killed, but not before his son had been through extensive indoctrination in Al-Qaeda philosophy. He even played with the Bin Laden children while in the Al-Qaeda camps.
He was with Taliban forces in July 2002 when they clashed with U.S.-led troops. The exact details of the firefight are provided at inordinate length in Khadr’s Wikipedia entry, but it ended with a U.S. soldier shooting him in the back after assuming he had hurled a grenade following the Taliban forces’ surrender. After recovering from his wounds in Bagram air base (and being abused while doing so), the 15-year-old Khadr was eventually moved to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains today. He is currently facing trial for hurling the grenade.
The key issues are twofold: whether or not Khadr actually threw the grenade, which killed a U.S. officer and wounded two others not; and whether Canada will acknowledge that he was a child soldier, and will request his return to this country. At present, the Canadian federal government refuses to intervene, unlike other nations whose citizens spent time in Guantanamo Bay. There is relatively little public pressure to bring “home” the son of what an older sibling called “an Al-Qaeda family.” Khadr is now 21, and has spent almost a third of his life in Guantanamo.
Since I try to take a long-term view on such issues, I wince when I think about how this will look a dozen years from now. Omar Khadr seems to have had little power over his own life’s direction, having been under his father’s influence, then under that of the Taliban commanders, and then under that of his interrogators. Whether he has had enough of radical Islamism; or whether he is hopelessly traumatised by being maltreated and threatened with homosexual rape at Bagram, followed by his years in Guantanamo; whether he even knows what he believes any more, is impossible to say. I do think he’s not too bright, which doesn’t augur well.
He could conceivably get back to Canada one day and wait for a chance to blow up himself and some of his tormentors, or their superiors in government. Or, he might become a model citizen, and put his Al-Qaeda past behind him. My guess is that he’s too much of a mess at this point to do much of anything with his life. I see him in a basement playing video games at age 30, secretly recalling the good times in the Al-Qaeda training camps when it was all a kind of Boy Scout adventure but with real rocket launchers, and occasionally having nightmares about interrogators in Bagram twisting his wounded shoulder, while wishing he could go and live far, far away from other people.
But nobody knows.
The debate, however, seems to occur mostly on the level of news-site comments. He was a child soldier; he chose to fight for Al-Qaeda; he’s a nice kid who’s had a raw deal; he was a murderous terrorist who should spend 20 more years in Gitmo. The fact that most of his family is still radical-Islamist in inclination doesn’t do anything for him. If he disavowed his family, his mother especially, he might make it home, but since he has no other people in the world he feels he can trust, that won’t happen. His hearings in Guantanamo Bay drag on, the rules, charges and officials changing every few months, and he is unlikely to be free this year or next.
His cause has been championed by Amnesty International and the Canadian Bar Association among others, but against such groups are Dan the PT and his buddies. Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, counting on Dan and the gang to re-elect it, sees no brownie points to win in bringing Khadr back to Canada. There’s a foundering economy, rising oil prices, the Beijing Olympics in a few weeks, and a minority in the Canadian Parliament that mustn’t be squandered. Treaties regarding child soldiers? Well, we know the people in Guantanamo Bay are not lawful combatants anyway, so forget those.
I cringe at the thought of living under a non-democratic political system. Bureaucracies are inherently stupid and thus cruel, but countries without an effective, informed press and an articulate opposition create bureaucracies of unimaginable stupidity and dishonesty. And thus of cruelty.
At the same time, it seems clear that online “comments” are increasingly what we have in place of serious discussion. They’re the popular equivalent of sound-bite news reporting, or those “debates” between two hyperbolic spokespersons from two side of an issue who cannot offer any consensus or resolution. This sort of thing has driven me to avoid watching TV news any more. Populism scares me, because it’s the people who are losing most by it.
The case of Omar Khadr is messy, with no good solution. Angry fear and resentment in such hot-button cases have trumped issues of principle, while eloquence and justice are increasingly rare. But we need these precisely because it’s in the exceptions, the messy, unlovable cases where the “victim” is also, or appears to be also, a perpetrator, that our social and legal systems are tested most significantly. I do wonder if Dan the Poor Taxpayer, who seemingly has plenty of leisure-time to post online comments, ever considers that.
I hope so. Even while I expect that Omar Khadr, if and when he is freed, will never step out wholly from the shadow of his father, of his other family members, and of the brutal ideology whose service led him to the plight in which he finds himself today.