Stupid headline of yesterday, courtesy the agenda-ed Globe and Mail:

Ruling clears way for Khadr trial

Now that’s a Canadian court ruling, of no legal effect or import for the US.  It has in reality nothing to do with clearing the way for the actual trial at Gitmo. Lordy, but we are delusionally self-centred.

Update thought:  From the second link, Seattle PI:

…
Those concerns could explain why, according to legal sources, the Obama administration has been eager to avert the trial by striking a plea deal with Khadr that could involve him serving some additional prison time, perhaps in Canada. At a hearing this month, Khadr said he’d rejected a deal that involved him serving an additional five years…
 
Legal sources said officials at the State Department have been eager to work out a plea deal, but military officials are staunchly opposed to a resolution that doesn’t require Khadr to admit guilt and serve substantial additional jail time…”

Those wussies at State.  So work a deal to have him transferred to serve his time in Canada, “additional” my foot–here he would get out almost immediately on the basis of time served.  I can’t recall much discussion on that scenario here.

Mark
Ottawa

A new Angus Reid public opinion poll shows that most Canadians are absolutely content with Canada’s most famous “child soldier” facing a military commission in Guantanamo Bay.

46% agreed that the proper decision is to let Omar face prosecution in Cuba, with the highest number of people feeling that way residing in Alberta [56%]. Meanwhile, 36% of Canadians believe that Canada should demand Omar’s repatriation and face whatever punishment the government sees fit to give him here. Only in Quebec, unsurprisingly, did more people want Omar returned than left in Cuba.

Those numbers are up significantly from February, when Canadians were divided equally by 40% each. In August of 2009 the number of Canadians who wanted Omar to stay in Cuba had a slight edge over the other side by 42% to 40%. A ten per cent divide is large enough to suggest that people are comfortable with the direction being taken by the Americans, even if 42% don’t think he’ll get a fair trial. Only Ontarians, Albertans, and Atlantic Canadians believe that Omar Khadr will get a fair trial in Cuba, while people in BC, the prairies, and Quebec, don’t think he will. The latter province was the most pessimistic a fair trial would take place.

Even so, the gap between those who are hopeful Omar will get a fair trial and those who don’t has shrunk since February, when 47% disagreed to 39% who agreed.

Ultimately what it may come down to is the fact that most Canadians just don’t care about the young terrorist. The survey showed that 37% feel “sympathy” for Omar’s plight, while 50% do not. This was true for every province, including Quebec, where 43% did not sympathize, although 41% did sympathize, the highest in the country.

Additionally, 49% to 26% agreed with the Supreme Court decision that acknowledged the federal government cannot be forced to repatriate Khadr.

What we see from this poll is perhaps a lot different from what sense we get about the Khadr conundrum in the media, with Canadians being comfortable he’s in Cuba facing military justice, and that they by and large do not sympathize with a plight of his own creation.

Omar during happier times, learning to make an IED for infidel American soldiers.

I was watching the CBC News — a mistake, I know, but I only have basic cable — and Carole McNeil was interviewing Omar Khadr’s fatherly lawyer, Dennis Edney. His lawyer has so much faith in the young terror apprentice, that he would be willing to shack up with him in Edmonton, something that not even fellow Omar fans in the official opposition have offered.

Dennis Edney wants to negotiate the terms of Omar Khadr’s release, but that will not include a plea agreement of guilt.

“I’m going to push for whatever it takes to get him home,” Mr.Edney told the CBC. “I’ve never met anybody in my life who has been so abused, so abandoned.”

Mr.Edney has a “four-point plan” for Omar, which includes housing him in Edmonton, far from his terrorist family in Toronto.

“We will provide education,” Mr.Edney said. “We will provide him with a home, he will not reside with his own family, we will provide him with psychological and medical help and we will rely upon the comments and advice given to us by those experts on how best to assist Omar Khadr.”

When he told Carole McNeil that he had a University lined up in Alberta to give him free education, I almost lost my lunch.

What kind of a sick, twisted, utterly depraved kind of person rewards a terrorist with free education, room and board, and psychological help? I think Mr.Edney is the one who needs to check into a hospital forthwith.

There are literally thousands of Canadians, like myself, who have never chopped off the hands of Afghans or made IED’s in a dark tent, who would love to be offered free University education to better our lives in Canada. There are thousands of Canadians who live their lives without being able to reach their full potential because of a barrier of access to psychological treatment, post-secondary education, and the constant demands of high-priced housing.

The only thing more disturbing than this love affair that people seem to have with Guantanamo’s Littlest Hobo is the fact that little Omar is likely to launch a lawsuit against the government the moment he steps off that airplane. In fact the suit would probably be served just as Omar’s plane entered Canadian airspace, and all over the news by the time the media horde pushed up against Canada’s celebrity idol.

For those who think the great injustice is Omar’s lengthy wait for trial, it would pale in comparison to his payday repatriation and free post-secondary education. You know, we’re always told that crime doesn’t pay, but a gig as a Canadian “child soldier” has a huge upside.

Sometimes life doesn’t just imitate art, it imitates Saturday morning cartoons. Omar Khadr, notorious terror apprentice apprehended in Afghanistan in 2002, is on Twitter. No, I know it’s not really him, but someone who has obviously taken it upon himself to adopt Omar’s internet identity for the purposes of fighting for his repatriation.

It’s not completely unpredictable. Everybody uses whatever tools they have at their disposal these days to reach out to a broader audience. Which is why politicians also use Twitter. How could it hurt to spread the word by simply entering 140 characters or less into a text box, to be read and retweeted by dozens, possibly hundreds of people? Well, unless you’re Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages James Moore. Then you block people from reading your tweets.

But what’s interesting is who fake Omar decided to follow. He’s following federal MP Bob Rae, who has been vociferous in support of Omar’s repatriation. There’s Justin Trudeau. There’s the major news dailies. There’s Jack Layton and Olivia Chow. And then it just gets kind of weird. Fake Omar follows Immigration Minister Jason Kennedy, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Anderson Cooper, and the big man himself, Barack Obama.

None of these people follows fake Omar back, except for one:

So fake Omar is being followed by real Michael Ignatieff, in order to update him on snappy news items such as “[days] I have been wrongfully detained: 2,782.” Unfortunately, fake Omar has been disturbingly unspecific about the events leading to his arrest and capture. Now that he has a medium to run a public relations campaign, perhaps he can let us all in on the untold “true story”.

h/t Dominion Pundit

The media has been reporting on Justice Iacobucci’s supplemental report into the actions of Canadian officials in relation to Abdullah Almaki, Mauyyed Nureddin, and Ahmad Abou-El-Maati.

But as this blogger points out, nobody seems to have reported on Ahmad Abou El-Maati’s brother, Amer El-Maati:

“In 1996, Amer travelled to Surobi, to find his younger brother who had spent four years fighting alongside Gulbuddin Hekmatyar against the Taliban. The pair retreated north with Hekmatyar’s forces, and then Ahmad went to Tehran to visit their mother and sister, while Amer traveled to Peshawar where he began working for the NGO Health and Education Projects International, created by Ahmed Khadr.

In 1998 he obtained a Canadian passport while living in Pakistan. Khadr’s son Abdurahman testified in Montreal in the summer of 2004 that El-Maati had given his Canadian passport to a man known as Idriss.”

Amer El-Maati is a Kuwaiti born Canadian citizen who the United States has alleged is a member of Al-Qaeda, and who attended flight school to possibly hijack a Canadian plane to fly into American buildings. There is currently a bounty on his head of $5 million by the United States, and is known as a wanted terrorist. At this very moment in time, nobody knows the whereabouts of this man.

A little more background on Ahmad Abou El-Maati. In August of 2001, before the 9/11 attacks took place, Mr.El-Maati was stopped at the U.S.-Canada border, where guards found a schematic map of Ottawa marking government buildings and nuclear research facilities. Despite denying ownership of the map, a friend later admitted that Mr.El-Maati showed it to him.

“He showed me the map. And the map had literally all kinds of government installations,” said a man who used to know him. “If I was a border person and I saw this map with a Middle Eastern-looking person and all these nuclear sites and all these government installations I can understand why they said, ‘Well, hey pal, what are you doing?’ And apparently they really grilled him. When he came to me he was nearly in tears he was shaken up so bad about it.”

In November of 2001, a document granting Amer El-Maati Canadian citizenship was discovered in an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan. Despite being held several times by Syrian and Egyptian agents, he was eventually released.

The connection to Maher Arar and Ahmad El-Maati is based on the statement that Mr.Arar said he “once bumped into Mr.El-Maati in a mechanic’s garage in Ottawa”. And if you’ll remember, Omar Khadr said during interrogation with Canadian officials, interrogation that the government of Canada has asked not be used at his trial, that he met Maher Arar in Afghanistan.

Related

An alternate view on what really happened with Maher Arar. Western Standard, February of 2007.

Like terrorist father, like terrorist son.

There must be times that the terrorists just lean back on their prayer mats and heave a long and hearty laugh at how stupid the western world is. They must elbow each other and smirk at how easy it is to get people to sympathize with their plans, even as they sharpen the blade in plain sight of the apologists.

It’s common knowledge that Great Britain has been infiltrated by radical Islam, to the point where the country has been designated the single greatest Islamic threat in the western world by the Pentagon. And while the long-suffering Anglo saps who continue working and voting Labour see their country transformed into one where the most popular baby name is “Muhammad”, people like Anjem Choudary organize Sharia-state groups to protest British soldiers while receiving state welfare. His rights are furthermore protected by Human Rights councils which encourage diversity, even when that kind of diversity aims to destroy you.

In Canada we reward terrorists with multimillionaire contracts for giving up their Islamic allies, and call them heroes. Instead of taking Shaher Elsohemy and roughing him up until he squealed on the Toronto 18, we gave him $4-million, cars, houses, and protection for life. Again, he must be chuckling at how stupid Canadians are for paying off his debts and giving him a comfortable lifestyle in exchange for information he should have provided as a conscientious citizen of this country for free.

Then there’s the prodigal son of terrorism, that love child of Canadian official multiculturalism and a crackerjack citizenship they gave his father who hung around here for the free medicare in between bouts of jihad, Omar Khadr.

His father, the known Egyptian terrorist Ahmed Said Khadr, was freed from Pakistan in 1995 after Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien interceded on his behalf. Lacking evidence to suggest Ahmed Khadr was involved in an al-Qaeda bombing, Pakistan dropped their charges and released the elder Khadr. Upon returning to Canada, it is reported he kissed the ground. He knew how close he had come to being delivered to justice in Pakistan, before being rescued by the Prime Minister.

In 2001 his son, young terror apprentice Omar, was cavorting in Afghanistan around the time of America’s war on terror commencement, learning how to do things like cut the hands off of infidels, plant IED landmines, and discover the true word of Allah. A child soldier? A convenient excusement for his willing participation in treasonous acts against the western world.

When he was captured by the Americans after murdering Sergeant First Class Christopher James Speer with a hand-grenade, the U.S. forces made a considerable mistake. Unlike the enemy they fight, a ruthless group of Islamic mercenaries who are paid upon delivery in heaven with virgins and riches, the world class U.S. Army is trained to save the lives of all those they encounter wounded on the battlefield. Even future poster boy for victimhood, Omar Khadr.

Now, eight years after his capture, and thanks to a ludicrous ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada that his rights were violated, Omar Khadr’s six-year old lawsuit against the government of Canada has been upgraded to $10 million. Only 23-years-old, Omar, too, must be smirking in his cell.

No average Canadian working for fifty years to finish with a subsistence pension will ever be able to retire on $10 million. Nor does it matter that these millions of average Canadians will be paying the liberal guilt money to Omar Khadr’s terrorist trust fund. Justice must be served, damn it, and if you can’t prove in a court of law what anybody with wikipedia, a 10-minute attention span, and an iota of Canadian-born common sense can, then Omar deserves his money.

After all, he isn’t twisting our arms to give us his blood money. He is relying on our inherent willingness to capitulate to the circumstantial evidence that every single one of the Khadr Klan was caught red-handed in Afghanistan or Pakistan doing naughty things with naughty people, but that it doesn’t constitute a legal consensus for murder or terrorism. That conclusion can only be arrived at in the minds of the average Canadians who will watch Omar drive his luxury Lexus past us on his way to attend whatever state-sponsored University degree he gets for his “rehabilitation”.

The cheaper method, sadly no longer available to us, was to leave his blood-soaked carcass to rot in that abandoned Soviet airbase in Khost, Afghanistan.

The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 yesterday that Omar Khadr’s “Charter rights” had been violated when Canadian officials assisted in an “illegal interrogation”, but refused to order him repatriated. Which isn’t surprising, since last time I checked, Omar was being held in a foreign country that intends to prosecute him for acts of terrorism.

The court decided that the Canadian response was a based on a sensitive matter of foreign policy, and that the government should be given a chance to rectify Omar’s plight. But the court decision is interesting, in that it has said that the young terrorist’s rights were infringed upon, specifically the constitutional rights he carried with him when he decided to join al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. One is left to wonder how or why the United States would care about the constitutional rights of a foreign national who had participated in an act of terrorism against their soldiers.

That’s why the ruling condemns Canadian officials in their interrogations in 2003 and 2004, and not the criminal proceedings and circumstances of his treatment by the Americans. And as we all recall, Canadian officials did nasty things to Omar, like keep him up past his bedtime, and feed him Subway Sandwiches.

Now after all the brave talk about bringing Omar back to Canada where he would be repatriated, rehabilitated, and undoubtedly renumerated by the guilty liberal conscience of a nation, we find out that the darling child soldier of the media probably wouldn’t face any charges here. Not even for being a damned embarrassment.

No, instead we are forced to read flatulent pieces from sympathetic souls bemoaning the mistreatment of the jihadi apprentice.

“It’s a tragic state of affairs”, Don Martin writes in the National Post. Captured as a child, he could be a middle-aged man by the time he walks free, a psychological mess by then, who will harbour an intensified hatred of the U.S. and Canada. If he wasn’t dangerous before, he will be upon his release.

This is terrorist apologism at its very finest art. Not only does it suggest that the real crime that has been committed here didn’t come from the hands of the terrorist himself, but that if Omar later walks into a supermarket loaded with plastic explosives and blows everybody sky high, it’ll all be the making of the bad men at Guantanamo Bay, and the uncaring CSIS officials who deprived him of punctual nap times.

But for those of us who live in the real world, we understand that actions have consequences, and that a very basic consequence to joining up with al-Qaeda and fighting U.S. soldiers is to be held in maximum security detention facilities. My sympathies lie not with the smiling bearded man of the updated photo released from Guantanamo Bay, but for the family of the American soldier who died as a result of having crossing paths with him.

The problem with fighting terrorism is that it’s best left finished on the battlefield, preferably under the “shoot, shovel, and shutup” policy. Saving Omar Khadr’s life on the battlefield was perhaps the worst mistake the Americans made next to failing to mortally wound him. One the biggest objections that Canadians have, or the vast majority of common sense Canadians anyway, is that they know Omar won’t get a trial in Canada. Proving in a court of law the clandestine nature of plotting to murder women and children in a foreign country isn’t easy. Hence the reason for the low success rate of convicted terrorists in Guantanamo Bay.

Of course we all know from the recidivism rate that they were terrorists, but that the courts fall short of being able to prove what we already know. The last thing that Canadians want is Omar Khadr returning to a ticker tape parade from his many supporters, the inevitable launching of a lawsuit, and the $20-million compensation settlement which would put Omar and his dear homosexual-hating mother in a palace to live out the rest of his days.

That is the greatest fear and not, as Don Martin fantasizes, languishing in some hole until he’s an old man.

Related

Mark Collins: “So far as I have been able to see today, almost all the talking heads on TV dealing with the Supreme Court’s decision on Mr Khadr (rights were abused, government doesn’t have to ask for his return) fail to mention one rather significant fact. The governments in power when the now-judged tainted interviews by Canadian officials with Mr Khadr took place (in 2003 and 2004) were those of Liberals Jean Chretien and Paul Martin. Not–though many viewers might easily infer it–the government of Conservative Stephen Harper.”