Crime and Punishment

Legally sound, morally repugnant, according to the Supreme Court of Canada which ruled in an unanimous, 9-0 decision that the Government of Canada is in full legal compliance in its insistence on having the final word on matters relating to foreign affairs. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson took the opportunity to reiterate the government's stance of non-interference with a friendly government's handling of an enemy combatant accused of serious war crimes.

The Supreme Court justices went out of their way to ensure that government and the country at large understands that this is a legal decision. Which does not impair their apparently collective condemnation of unjustness on the part of government by withholding from Omar Khadr other legal obligations, as they see it, under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Despite the five charges levelled against accused terrorist Omar Khadr: murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, material support for terrorism and spying, the learned justices hold that his human rights as a Canadian have been neglected through the government's refusal to request his repatriation to Canada from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

Claiming that his charter rights were violated when Canadian government officials undertook to interrogate him at Guantanamo Bay with a view to sharing the results of that interrogation with U.S. officials. Is that not precisely what collaborating, co-operating countries do to assist one another?

Is there any question that this man represents a violent challenge to law and order, security and public safety in North America?

Sleep deprivation is cited as the torture to which Mr. Khadr was exposed, rendering him more malleable under questioning due to extreme fatigue. A maltreatment which, according to the collective wisdom of the justices constitutes a situation which "offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects." Yes, well it would, and it does. Under most circumstances.

This is a man who as an impressionable boy was taught by his Islamist-deranged parents to hate the very democratic institutions within Canada that gave them the freedom to live as they preferred, even while they deplored the odious rot they saw within its society and its government. The Khadrs, Islamist jihadists involved with the most extreme threats to Western stability taught their children hatred and trained them to murder those whom they hated.

The Elder Khadr, father to Omar, had no compunction about sending his teen-age son to terrorist training camps; he saw that as his children's religious obligations toward a warped version of Islam. The Western social consciousness that deplores the very idea of holding adolescents accountable for violent actions moves in sympathy with Omar Khadr.

We do, on the other hand, judge and try and impose penalties on young people who commit violent social atrocities, holding them accountable for their dreadful actions against others, while still nominally protecting them from public display and too-onerous sentences seen as an offence against their youth.

In all such instances the judgement and the sentence should fit the crime. In Mr. Khadr's instance that seems to be the case, up until now, although the final sentence is still unknown. Even "time off for good behaviour" is a possibility. And then, heaven forfend, his presence will become Canada's problem once again.