It's Called Responsibility, PMSH

So, in the wake of getting thoroughly spanked for failing to carry out its responibilties, the HarperCon$ are plotting an appeal of the court ruling which obliges them to actually take steps to repatriate a Canadian citizen that has been allowed to rot in Guantanamo Bay for the last several years.

A day after a federal judge ordered the Harper government to seek Omar Khadr's repatriation, Canada's foreign affairs minister went on the offensive by telling the House of Commons that young terror suspect stands accused of "building and planting explosive devices" that killed soldiers in Afghanistan.

Uh huh. I'm sure the evidence for this is so amazingly reliable.

I'll give Canada's politicians a hint - the issue is not what Khadr did or did not do in Afghanistan. It's about Canada's obligations to its citizens, at home and abroad. It's about the international conventions that Canada is signatory to - such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child ... among others.

... and lastly, it's about truth and justice. Holding someone illegally for 7 years, subjecting them to torture and putting them before a faux court system is hardly just - and we all know how relaible testimony from torture is.

I don't have to like the Khadr family's past to recognize the grave injustice that has been done to Omar Khadr. That Harper's government wishes to prolong this farce is a condemnation of conservative ideology in Canada.

Good Lord ...

If you can read this in its entirety (without walking away in anger), one has to wonder just why it is Harper refuses to do anything on behalf of Omar Khadr.

Mr. Vandeveld also discovered that, after Mr. Jawad's transfer to U.S. authorities at the Bagram detention facilities in northern Afghanistan, he was subjected to several forms of abuse, including “linguistic separation” and the “frequent flier program,” which involved moving detainees constantly from cell to cell for weeks at a time as a form of sleep deprivation. It emerged last year that Mr. Khadr had been subjected to the same program.

“I couldn't bring myself to believe Americans could do this,” he said. “This was just sadistic mistreatment of a kid.”

Or does Mr. Harper actually believe that abuse and torture are acceptable ways to treat people?

Or perhaps, you'd like to consider the following bit about evidence:

Mr. Vandeveld travelled to Kabul to interview the Afghan security officers who detained and questioned the suspect. The Afghans produced a written confession with Mr. Jawad's thumbprint at the bottom. The only problem was, the confession was in Dari – Mr. Jawad speaks Pashto, and is functionally illiterate

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's going on here, does it? To anyone with even a modicum of respect for law and due process, this is beyond the pale. For our government to be complicit in such activities is repugnant indeed.

Obama's First Week In Office

Well, if nothing else, Obama's made it quite plain in the last few days that whatever the "norm" used to be under Bush II, it is now over.

In ordering the shutdown of Guantanmo Bay, and stripping the CIA of their "black prisons" and 'torture tourism' programs, he has signalled that the United States is emerging from one of its darkest periods on the world stage.

Much of what Obama has done is really just the beginning of tearing down the secrecy and self-serving policies of Bush II / Cheney. I think that Bush II did more damage to the United States than anyone realizes yet. It will probably take Obama's first year to even begin the process of untangling the knots and disarming the booby traps that Bush II, and probably to a greater degree Cheney, created within the structure and operation of government. I hope that Obama will continue to repeal the various odious 'executive orders' and other rules that Bush II cooked up while sitting in the oval office which are destructive not only to the United States as a political power, but to its citizens as well.

If one thing became clear in the last 8 years it was that Bush II and Cheney were not - definitely not - open to the public about what they were doing. Nor did they have any respect for the fundamental principles of the rule of law and government openness. Obama has made it clear that he sees things quite differently.

While I do not expect to agree with everything that this president does, I have to give him credit for tackling some pretty odious issues head on within days of being sworn in.

(I see that the hand wringing over the disposal of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay has already begun. Of course, they only have half of the facts, and are completely ignoring this Presidential Order which is clearly intended to address that question in as reasonable way as possible.

What to do with the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is not an easy question to answer - few of them can be charged with any crimes under US law. That means they should be released. However, there's good reason to believe that many of them have been badly mistreated while detained and interrogated. There is a very real possibility that the US finds itself 'holding a tiger by the tail' right now. Some of those detainees are going to go away quietly, but some will have become hardened in their hatred of the United States as a result of their treatment - they are apt as not to lash out and bite - hard. That is far from the last problem that these detainees present. Many of them are effectively homeless today. The countries that they called home deny their citizenship for fear of being accused of being complicit, if citizenship can even be established for them - far from an easily solved problem)

Interesting Challenge of Guantanamo Bay

I see that six detainees at Guantanamo Bay are challenging their detention in a US court.

The six Algerians were arrested in Bosnia in the weeks following the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and have been held without charge ever since.

They deny government claims that they were planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight with al-Qaeda and the Taleban against US troops.

This is very much at the heart of my long standing objections to the very existence of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Not only have the people being held there been denied basic access to due process, but worse they have been held even in the absence of coherent evidence to support the ostensible reasons for their detention.

I have to imagine that this case is the first of many that will ultimately dismantle some of the more awful aspects of the Bush II legacy. (Like trying to hold people in a legal limbo indefinitely)

What Part of "Citizen" Do You Not Understand

Jeepers - if I read one more dolt columnist start blathering on about how the awful Omar Khadr should be rot in an American gulag, I'm going to scream.

For crying out loud, what does it take these morons to get their heads around the fact that Omar Khadr was born here, and is every bit as much a citizen of Canada as they are?

Do we not, as a nation, believe that our citizens deserve fair and reasonable treatment under the law, regardless of where they are detained? Surely you can't be arguing that the half-baked "tribunal" process that allows evidence from torture is anything close to what would be considered a fair trial?

I suggest that should one of these clowns find themselves the subject of one of those funky "extraordinary renditions", that they better be prepared to suck up whatever treatment is handed to them by their captors in silence - after all, Washington still claims that those lovely renditions are legal, just as they insist that Guantanamo Bay represents a valid and legal handling of people captured in a combat zone.

... and apparently in Harper's world, once you step foot outside of Canada, you aren't a Canadian any more.

HarperCon$: Sticking To A Post

Apparently, Harper still thinks he's the leader of the opposition:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper remains unmoved and his spokesman, Kory Teneycke, has accused the Liberals of “revisionism and hypocrisy” for only now adopting the cause.

“This is the process the Liberals chose, and we're sticking with it,” Mr. Teneycke said in an interview Sunday.

In short, Harper is going to stick to his stance on Omar Khadr because he thinks he can pin it on the Liberals politically.

How mature of him. He's willing to throw a Canadian citizen away for points. I have news for you Mr. Harper, politics isn't a videogame. You don't come out on top for having a 'high score'...and I don't think you get any bonus points for being a cold-hearted, unfeeling clod either.

But his new spokesbot can't stop, and comes out in a full out lie:

"This information was in their hands when they made these decisions," he said.

... and then there's the other side of the story.

But today, Liberal Dan McTeague – a parliamentary secretary who had been given a special responsibility for Canadians detained abroad – says he regrets telling Canadians that Mr. Khadr was being treated humanely.

“I said it many times, ‘We've been given assurances by Americans.'… I said it in [media] scrum after [media] scrum, I had to take them at their word,” Mr. McTeague said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. But now he says he was not in the loop on a sleep-deprivation program, that, according to a newly released Canadian briefing note, U.S. military officials had used against Mr. Khadr in 2004.

“That information was not made available to me at the time,” Mr. McTeague said. “Obviously I wouldn't have made that statement had I known that.”

Off the top of my head, either Spokesbot Teneycke is utterly clueless about what happened, or he's busy trying to apply as much spin as he can get.

Let's be clear about something here - I wasn't exactly impressed with how the Liberal governments dealt with the Khadr file either. However, we get to work with the facts we have today, and we must assess today's government on the basis of what we know today about that file. Leaving Mr. Khadr to fend for himself in a pseudo-legal "trial" that may or may not be fair is becoming less and less tenable as each day goes by and each new revelation escapes from the guarded worlds of Guantanamo Bay and CSIS.

The Harper government stands on its own actions - or lack of them.

It Does Little To Change My Opinions

In spite of the efforts to sanitize Guantanamo Bay and the prisoners held there, it's clear enough to me that the entire model that BushCo cooked up when they decided to use Guantanamo Bay for holding their prisoners remains not only legally dubious, but morally and ethically vile as well.

The simple fact is that the American government has had neither the honesty to call these people what they are - Prisoners of War (POWs), or to charge them with actual crimes and bear the consequences of attempting to apply US criminal law to events that happened halfway around the world from the USA.

Besides the obvious jurisdictional problems that attempting to apply US legal codes in foreign lands presents, the harsh reality is that the American government likely could not assemble sufficient evidence to make their claims against the detainees stand up in a court of law.

If they were to be honest, and declare them to be POWs, the United States would have to admit that they were engaged in a war, but then the problem becomes just as sticky for the Americans because the first question would be "who is the enemy?" - something which BushCo knows it cannot answer in terms that would satisfy the Geneva conventions that the USA is signatory to. It would also recognize a fairly broad set of rights as being applicable to the Guantanamo detainees that are currently vigorously denied.

However, the US has created a "double damnation" problem for itself. Not only is it unlikely that any body will ever hold the Guantanamo Bay trials being planned to be valid expressions of any understandable legal construct, but the the vast majority of the detainees held there today are now in something of a legal limbo - their home countries do not acknowledge them as citizens, and the US and its allies refuse to consider these people as refugees or other forms of civilian war casualty.

Given the conditions that the Americans have kept these people under, I can appreciate that there would be some reluctance to simply turn them loose in American civil society - it's a little bit of a "Tiger By The Tail" moment, and that isn't something that any of use really want to experience. However, that problem is a direct result of American ham-handedness in the entire affair, and it is now up to the American government to negotiate with other countries to find a home for captives who are arguably victims of American foreign policy in the first place.

Any "criminal trial" held at Guantanamo Bay is unjustifiable. Not only is the Bush Administration concocting a "judicial system" here based not upon any sense of reasoned law, instead they are dependent upon political expediency that puts them in an ever precarious position - for not only are the charges themselves (those few that have been laid) questionable (How can someone who is a participant in a "non-war" be held accountable for "war crimes"? If these people are "war criminals", then by definition they are held as "prisoners of war" - oh wait - that means they might actually have rights that can and should be measured...

No matter what steps the US takes to convince us that they are "looking after" the detainees at Guantanamo Bay "well", they are still holding people in a legal no man's land that is unconscionable - no matter how "humane" the conditions are.

Guano Bay Reprise

It seems that Bush's second attempt to create extra-judicial courts is collapsing on itself again.

Unfortunately for Mr. Khadr, this doesn't mean that he is likely to see any kind of freedom in the near future. The US government still claims that the people held there are "enemy combatants" - and will be held for the duration of 'The War on Terror'(tm).

Since BushCo refuses to acknowledge these people as POW's (and grant them appropriate treatment and rights), it seems to me that there is little chance of any release for these people until 2009.

A no-nonsense military judge lobbed a bombshell into the Bush administration's controversial terrorist tribunals, dismissing all charges against Canadian Omar Khadr Monday because prosecutors failed to label him an "unlawful" combatant.

Although the reason for dismissal seems to be "mostly semantics", I think there's more at play here than "just semantics". The judge is playing with semantics, but in doing so, he's also sending a signal to the Pentagon and the executive branch of the US government that he's not willing to participate in a charade.

Hours later after the first ruling, another judge, Navy Captain Keith Allred, similarly dismissed all charges against Salim Ahmed Hamdan, former driver for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Capt. Allred cited the same grounds, lack of jurisdiction because the government had failed to demonstrate Mr. Hamdan was an "unlawful" combatant.

Oh - this is interesting. I thought we were talking about a declaration of someone being "an unlawful enemy combatant", and it seems that the courts are saying that the government must demonstrate why such a designation is appropriate. That puts the government's case in a deep, dark little world of hurt.

Any appeal must be to the Court of Military Commission Review, created by the act. But it doesn't yet exist and no one has been named to sit on it.

Speaking of charades - notice that BushCo hasn't even finished setting up the overall structure required. Bushco wasn't expecting to have to actually use the appeals process, were they? I'm pretty sure that they wanted to get a couple of quick "slam-bam" convictions out of the way, and then proceed with whatever arbitrary punishments they could come up with.

Now, let's see just how much Harper does to get Khadr released to Canadian custody in the coming months - it will tell you a great deal about just how concerned about your civil rights Harper really is. (and I'll wager it isn't much)