Misplaced Compassion

Visiting Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler, an American military lawyer who has been assigned the unenviable task of defending Omar Khadr, has successfully lectured the Canadian Bar Association meeting in Calgary on the weekend. "I think that the Canadian legal community, like the Canadian government, like the Canadian people, has given the United States, their good ally and neighbour, the benefit of the doubt", said Lieut.-Cmdr. Kuebler.

Think what he may, when a Canadian citizen commits a crime in the United States he becomes subject to American law. He is arrested, tried and imprisoned in the country in which that crime was committed. Unless there is a very compelling reason for his government to become involved; whether a question of a fair trial, or for humanitarian and health reasons a case could be made that he might serve his time in his country of origin; a matter of diplomacy between these neighbours.

In the instance of Omar Khadr, the youngest member of the notorious Khadr clan, stationed in Canada, granted citizenship in Canada, where the parents condemned the values that Canadians hold dear along with this society's degraded morals, and took their family to Pakistan for training and an Islamist lifestyle, the onus for protecting any member of this family is not quite as for an ordinary Canadian. This young man was groomed as a jihadist, and young as he was, at 15, he fought among other terrorists as an equal.

He was observed to have thrown a grenade that took the life of a U.S. army medic while in the process of engaging in fundamentalist religious-inspired guerrilla war with American troops. He was captured in Afghanistan after a skirmish with American troops, as an enemy combatant, one who had successfully taken the life of another person. He has spent five years in the infamous military compound in Cuba, yet to be dealt with by the courts.

He faces a military trial for what are alleged to be war crimes, but there is no disputing that his actions of free will in the prosecution of a holy war against infidels directly caused the death of a human being. Human rights groups claim that U.S. treatment of enemy combatants represent an affront to justice. And they are possibly correct in this assessment.

Grooming a young boy, along with his siblings, to become skilled at warfare with the intent of killing in recognition of a religious duty may also be confronted as an affront to humanity.

"It would be unimaginable that this could happen to a 15-year-old in Canada", said Parker MacCarthy, president of the Canadian Bar Association, explaining his newfound support of bringing Mr. Khadr, now 20 years of age, back to Canada. If he were to be tried in Canada, for a crime committed as a young offender, the stiffest sentence he might face under the Youth Criminal Justice Act would be six years.

But this man does not represent an ordinary run-of-the-mill Canadian youth who offended, even one who killed another person.

And if, at the age of 15, even an ordinary run-of-the-mill Canadian youth hadn't the intellectual and emotional maturity to understand that killing another human being is an action that is final, with no chance at reversal, one might have good reason to feel this is the act of an individual whose intellectual apprehension has been retarded and a light sentence might be appropriate with certain provisos.

There are also many who, in the face of rising violence among youth and the rising phenomenon of urban gang killings, that the Youth Criminal Justice Act should be revisited and revised. But that too is another story.