A child soldier by any other name...

A child soldier by any other name...: "Here's my column on Khadr that ran in 24 Hours a couple of weeks back. This one earned me one 'I wish you were dead' and a couple accusations of being a traitor. There was one supportive e-mail though... Can't imagine what kind of e-mail Khadr's lawyer Dennis Edney gets.

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On Monday, Omar Khadr, arrested on the battlefield in Afghanistan when just 15 years old, pled guilty in front of an American military commission for killing an American soldier.

The final confession of a terrorist? Justice for the soldier’s family? A victory in the war on terror?



Hardly.



Khadr’s guilty plea marks the deplorable low point of an ongoing human rights violation that played out over eight years in the form of our Canadian government’s willing complicity in the abuse and illegal detention of a Canadian citizen child soldier, from 2002 to today. This abuse of Omar Khadr for his “crime” of being taken to Afghanistan and educated and taught to fight Americans by his father is, to our government, apparently Khadr’s just desserts. You know, for being a terrorist. A very young terrorist, but a terrorist.



Our government’s attitude wasn’t always this way.



In 2000, the Government of Canada through the Canadian International Development Agency held an international conference on “war-affected children” called, poetically, “From Words to Action.”

One of key action items of the conference? How to end the use of child soldiers and reintegrate child soldiers back into society. The government-funded conference was designed to “mobilize international action on this critical issue.”



I think it’s safe to say that none of the government-endorsed papers presented at that conference recommended taking child soldiers and interrogating them repeatedly while they are injured, subjecting them to sleep deprivation techniques, and holding them in an illegal international detention facility to avoid the application of the domestic law.



However, all of these things, and more, have happened to Omar Khadr since his arrest. Canada’s top court found that the former child soldier had been subjected to something called the “frequent flyer program” by the Americans, a sleep deprivation technique designed to make him less resistant to interrogation. A technique more bluntly called “cruel and unusual” by our Federal Court of Appeal.



The conduct of Canadian officials towards Mr. Khadr was so egregious that Canada’s Federal Court issued an injunction preventing the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade from further interviewing Mr. Khadr in order to “prevent a potential grave injustice” from occurring.



More than eight years after his original arrest, after denying repeatedly that he killed the soldier in question, the grave injustice took place on Monday as Khadr pleaded guilty. Surely the Canadian government’s promise to Khadr that if he did plead guilty, the Canadian government would finally repatriate him had nothing to do with his decision.



Are there any of us that would not plead guilty after years of abuse and the promise of a return home, regardless of the truth of the plea? I wonder. I also wonder why our government that would accept such kangaroo justice and abuse of human rights. What security do any of us have if the people we elect can do away with human rights so easily?

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