...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Tears for Omar: The videotape showing Omar Khadr being interrogated at Gitmo has struck a chord with some Canadians—as his lawyers knew it would when they decided to release it. Liberal leader wannabe Bob Rae, for one, is outraged that, at such a tender age (he was sixteen at the time) Omar had to endure such dreadful abuse.

In reality, as Stephen Brown and Jacob Laksin write in FrontPage Magazine, he was subjected to nothing of the kind:

...So far from brutalizing him, Khadr’s interrogator repeatedly tries to calm and reassure the detainee. Seeing that he’s stressed out, the interrogator urges Khadr to take a break ("take a few minutes to relax a bit"). Later in the video, he offers him –gasp! – a chocolate bar. On the whole, it looks more like a therapy session than an interrogation, let alone a violation of international law.

Indeed, Khadr has been treated exceptionally well during his residency at Guantanamo. For starters, the fact that he survived at all is a credit to the American military. In Afghanistan, Khadr had planted roadside bombs to kill coalition troops. Nonetheless, he was nursed back to health by military doctors who attended to the near-fatal wounds he suffered while trying to kill American servicemen. No legal or medical rights have been denied him, and Khadr’s first two lawyers, whom he dismissed, were university law professors. Now housed in the least restricted part of Guantanamo, he has been allowed to read – according to former Gitmo chaplain James Yee, Khadr was particularly delighted to receive Disney picture books – and has even memorized the Koran. In this environment, to portray Khadr as a victim of military child abuse is to distort the facts beyond recognition.

And that is precisely what Khadr’s defenders have done. It is fair to say that no Guantanamo detainee has aroused as much misplaced sympathy as the 21-year-old Islamist. Whether in the form of books weeping over “Guantanamo’s child,” or this week’s mendacious video stunt, the save-Khadr campaign goes on. If there is any good news to emerge from these unedifying proceedings it is that, for the time being at least, Khadr himself is staying right where he is.

What we have here is another opportunity for Harper’s opponents to try to score some political points against him. Doing so by turning Omar and his Taliban mama into figures of sympathy, though, has to represent a new low in Canadian politics.

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:00 | link | comments

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