08 Nov Leave Khadr in Guantanamo – reader

Contrarian reader Jon Coates of Halifax has no trouble with the kidnapping, rendition, and indefinite detention without due process to which Omar Khadr, a Canadian juvenile, has been subjected for seven years. He writes:

Omar Ahmed Khadr at age 14, one year before his capture and removal to Guantanamo.

I believe that Khadr is a prisoner of war and should stay right where he is until the war in Afghanistan has run its course, just like any other prisoner of war. As he is also being charged with criminal activity – killing an American medic, a non-combatant – and since he is in American custody for that crime, he should face American justice first. The United States is not some third world dictatorship and I am sure he will receive a fair trial – certainly fairer than he would have received in Afghanistan.

Once guilt or innocence has been established, then the Canadian government might act to have him returned to Canada. Or, as a prisoner of war, he might be repatriated to Afghanistan, the place where he was captured. In that case, he’d better hope the Taliban wins the war.

Well, either Khadr was a soldier and is now a prisoner of war entitled to the protections affording by the Geneva Conventions, or he is a civilian accused of a criminal act and entitled to the protections afforded accused persons under the US Constitution. Instead, for the first four years of his detention, Khadr was not treated as a prisoner of war but as “an enemy combatant,” whom the US denied Geneva protections. The Bush administration also argued that because Guantanamo prisoners were non-citizens held on foreign territory, the US Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear their appeals, a contention the court rejected in a 2006 decision.

Two points are missing from Coates’s analysis: First, as a 15-year-old, Khadr was a child soldier, a category civilized countries generally treat as victims not as perpetrators. Second, after widespread and credible accounts of torture inflicted on Guantanamo prisoners, every other western democracy has asked for and received the release of nationals detained there. The Harper government stands alone in its refusal to do so, and is even now appealing a federal court order requiring it to make such a request.

Coates’s faith in Khadr’s prospects for receiving a fair trial in the US no doubt reflect that country’s long and admirable tradition of devising, enshrining, and upholding Constitutional safeguards against police, prosecutorial, and judicial abuse. Whatever you think of its foreign policy, the US has shone a beacon a freedom to the world in this respect. That’s precisely what makes its despicable behavior at Guantanamo so dismaying.