The shame isn't only Obama's

Andy Worthington writes about the kangaroo court that is dealing with Omar Khadr in Guantánamo Bay.


Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama's Guantánamo Legacy

From the most important thing - that he was fifteen years old at the time - to his untreated injuries, torture, evidence that was revisionist, to say the least, retroactive laws drawn up after to cover what happened before and the attempts at a plea deal to subject him to even more time for a crime he was not old enough to, or no one is even sure he did, commit, the whole shameful episode is all there.

But the shame isn't only Obama's. There was not a peep out of the Canadian government either, which follows a deplorable trend under Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government to simply abandon Canadian citizens abroad if they happen to be the wrong colour (anything but white), the wrong sex (anything but male), the wrong religion (only Judaeo-Christians need apply) or less than stunningly wealthy. If you have one or more of these marks against you, you're out of luck.

On second thought, being stunningly wealthy will go a long way towards having the other drawbacks ignored. 

A small sample here:

Abousfian Abdelrazik

Brenda Martin

Suaad Mohamud Haji

Harper insists that the U.S. government has a right to continue to do what it does, in spite or our laws, our constitution, or that Canada is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and to the U.N. Declaration on the rights of the child. The law seems to be of no concern to him except when it applies to someone else's supposed violations of it.

What did the Canadian government know, and when did it know it?

If Harper's government didn't know what was going on, why not?

If it did and said nothing, or was complicit in the crimes by handing over prisoners without any guarantee that they would be treated humanely, then the government and the military leaders in Canada should be right up there beside the U.S. officials who condoned and carried out these crimes.

From Nat Hentoff at Village Voice:

History Will Not Absolve Us
Leaked Red Cross report sets up Bush team for international war-crimes trial

"If and when there's the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons, there will be mounds of evidence available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations, including an arm of the European parliament—as well as such deeply footnoted books as Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (St. Martin's Press) and Charlie Savage's just-published Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy (Little, Brown).

"... [I]f we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

"We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects."

Let's move Gitmo to Afghanistan

Oh, goodie! The U.S. is building a prison in Afghanistan to move some of its Guantanamo prisoners into. Great! It would be just as good as Cuba. Not in any of United States or its territories, so anything goes!

Is Canada going to be part of this too?

Deeper and deeper into the slime.

So - a huge foreign power with overwhelming military might invades your country and you fight back - and you're the crook? And somehow being repatriated to a U.S. run prison in your own country is supposed to make things better. You may be held without charge and tortured without oversight, but at least you're home.

I think I'm missing something.

US may move detainees to Afghan prison

WASHINGTON - The United States is helping build a prison in Afghanistan to take some prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay, but the White House said Friday it is not meant as an alternative to the detainee facility in Cuba.