Bring back Khadr now, Martin says
Ex-PM says he should have worked to repatriate prisoner while in office
COLIN FREEZE
July 21, 2008
Former prime minister Paul Martin said yesterday that Canada should lobby to bring back Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr.
"I think Bill Graham, who was foreign affairs minister at the time, said it the best. Which was, 'If we had known then what we know now, then we would have taken strenuous steps to repatriate Mr. Khadr to Canada,' " Mr. Martin told CTV's Question Period in an interview broadcast yesterday.
The former prime minister conceded that it is "easy" to operate with the benefit of hindsight, but said, "We should have repatriated him, and I believe that we should do it now."
Mr. Martin didn't specify yesterday what exactly he knows now that he didn't know before, but his remarks are consistent with those made by other members of the former Liberal government, including Mr. Graham.
Anne McLellan, Irwin Cotler and current Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion all now say either that they were unaware of the extent of the abuse allegations involving Mr. Khadr or that it is time he was tried in a Canadian court.
The issue of Omar Khadr, alleged by the Pentagon to be a 16-year-old "enemy combatant" when he was captured in Afghanistan after a deadly battle in 2002, has stretched into three separate federal governments. The case was seen as politically untouchable during the dying days of the Jean Chrétien era, and did not emerge as a priority for the Martin government of 2003-2006.
As always, the sitting Canadian government, regardless of political stripe, officially says it continues to seek assurances that Mr. Khadr is being treated well and upholds that the U.S. justice system must take its course before Canada intervenes. 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 yesterday. Accusing the opposition of "playing politics," he said recent public revelations about the Khadr file should have been known to the previous government. "This information was in their hands when they made these decisions," he said.
But now, 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."
He did say he worked behind the scenes making "countless attempts" over eight months to get the United States to concede to a Canadian visit that wouldn't involve intelligence officials. "There was opposition on almost everything I did," Mr. McTeague said. "... They eventually agreed to what they called a welfare visit."
A former top civil servant in Foreign Affairs said yesterday that while the Federal Court of Canada has since ruled that sleep deprivation is contrary to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, it may not have resonated all that strongly within the bureaucracy or been flagged to politicians.
"It's been going on since Christ was interrogated by Herod," Gar Pardy said in an interview yesterday. He retired in 2003, a year before the sleep deprivation memo concerning Mr. Khadr was written.
Mr. Pardy, a former consular chief who said his early efforts to get Mr. Khadr out of "Gitmo" were resisted by many in the Canadian government, added that the Canadian news media were partly responsible for the chill concerning Mr. Khadr.
After 9/11, accounts involving the teenaged prisoner almost inevitably pointed out that Mr. Chrétien had intervened for the suspect's father in 1996, when Pakistan had held the elder Khadr as an al-Qaeda suspect, before ultimately letting him go. "Mention the name Khadr around Ottawa in '02-'03 and everyone ducked for cover," Mr. Pardy said.
It is anticipated that the now-21-year-old Mr. Khadr will go on trial this fall in the death of an American soldier and other alleged war crimes.
"The members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban - while they may have thought they were defending themselves - they had no legal right under the laws of war to be engaging in combat," a U.S. State Department lawyer, John Bellinger told The Globe last year in a briefing. "Any combat that they were engaged in was illegal."
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Yep, Khadr looks like just another political football / hot potato for Ottawa
That last sentence attributed to the US State Dept lawyer John Bellinger is a liitle confusing to me though.
Is he saying that people being fired upon have no legal right to engage in combat under the laws of war?
Can someone break that down for me? Decker?
