There’s no question that Omar Khadr has been lying.
The question is if he has been lying for years about whether he threw the grenade that killed an American soldier, or if he is lying now in admitting guilt, to shorten his prison sentence.
Only Khadr knows for certain.
His chief Canadian lawyer believes it’s the latter; this week Dennis Edney said his job was to convince Khadr to lie.
He got Khadr to plead guilty to murder in war, after securing an agreement with the United States that will see him extradited and jailed in Canada.
The Canadian government only agreed to accept Khadr under pressure from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
After failing to shut down Guantanamo as promised, the last thing she and President Barrack Obama wanted to see was the first defendant being a former child soldier, prosecuted in violation of international conventions.
Khadr was 15 when he was arrested. He was 11 when he was sent to a terrorist training camp.
Khadr has been incarcerated for eight years, mostly in a U.S. military prison in Cuba, awaiting trial. If found guilty there, he faced life in jail.
Edney was convinced that he had no hope of winning an acquittal for Khadr, irrespective of the facts of the case. U.S. military justice tribunals are set up to deliver convictions, not justice, Edney says.
Consider the lie that the Americans told to help keep Khadr in prison.
The case against him relied heavily on the “fact” that he was the only one alive when American Special Forces attacked a compound where the grenade that killed Capt. Christopher Speer and blinded Sgt. Layne Morris was thrown.
That’s not true and the American military knew it from the outset.
Another Islamist insurgent was badly wounded but still alive in the compound when U.S. soldiers overran it. He died shortly afterwards.
If he was the potential grenade thrower, that would have weakened the case against Khadr.
So the armed forces prosecuting Khadr decided to hide that inconvenient fact.
The truth was mistakenly released to reporters in a batch of other documents in February 2008, more than five years after the fatal firefight between al-Qaida insurgents and U.S. Special Forces.
It’s an example of the way the United States abandoned its most sacred principles in order to “protect” itself following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Prisoners like Khadr, captured in the war on terror, were incarcerated in Cuba precisely to deny them the protections of American law.
They were subjected to interrogation techniques that most people and international law would call torture.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered changes in the way the military commissions operated. Obama promised to shut down the Guantanamo prison within a year of being elected, a pledge he failed to keep because so many Americans don’t want those prisoners in U.S. jails.
Many of America’s allies have refused to provide evidence or witnesses for prosecutions in Guantanamo Bay.
Canada stood by, blindly.
Khadr is the only prisoner from a Western nation still in Guantanamo Bay. All the others have long since been repatriated to their home countries and most have been released from jail.
The injustice against Khadr is worse than the rest, because he had no choice in what he did and where he went.
He was born in Canada, into a family headed by a ruthless Islamist fanatic.
Omar was a prisoner to his father’s ideology before he went to a training camp in Afghanistan as a youth to learn how to kill and plant roadside bombs.
He became a child soldier, bullied along with his brothers, not allowed to think for himself or to act on what he thought was right.
In that respect, he is different from Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Harper is an adult with the knowledge, skills and resources to do the right thing and speak up in defence of an abused child.
Instead, in the case of Omar Khadr, he chose to kowtow at every step to the bullying big American brother.
Joe McLaughlin retired last year after 25 years as managing editor of the Red Deer Advocate.