When Omar Khadr was granted bail last week, the Harper government actually did something logical: it argued in an emergency hearing that releasing someone who, since the age of 15, has never known life outside of the worlds worst detention facilities, would cause irreparable harm.
Indeed, it already has, but not in the way the government argued. For Canadas state security agencies and public safety ministers, the days of easy, unanswered attacks on Khadrs reputation, along with accusations of the alleged threat he poses to Canadians, are over.
Why? Because, for the very first time, the young man who represented for CSIS, the RCMP, and other war-on-terror enthusiasts the worst of the worst from Canadas first family of terror was finally free to respond in a quiet, dignified manner to his accusers.
Remarkably, a kid who at 15 was essentially orphaned, grievously wounded, traumatized by years of gang rape threats, and used as a human mop to wipe up his own urine while subjected to more than a decade of indefinite detention and torture, emerged in front of the media at his Edmonton lawyers home as a thoughtful, shy young man who, at 28 years of age, simply wants to start life anew.
Since his 2002 incarceration and torture at Afghanistans Bagram Air Force Base where he was interrogated by a team later implicated in the murder of fellow detainees and his subsequent transfer as the youngest inmate to Guantanamo Bay, Khadr has borne the weight of the most serious accusations. Even the CBC last week repeated the inaccurate label of convicted war criminal, though Khadr admits he signed a statement prepared by his captors to get away from the abuse he endured at Gitmo, where military commissions are regarded by most legal experts as kangaroo courts out of a Kafka novel.
Khadrs ability to come across in a manner that contradicts the Harper governments narrative poses a problem for Conservatives who, the day before Khadr walked free had, with Liberal support, passed the repressive Bill C-51, a massive piece of legislation based on over-heated fears of terrorist threats.
Perhaps now Canadians grounded in over a decades worth of Khadr-as-Dangerous-Super-Muslim will rethink not only his case, but also those of other young people who are now the focus of a related moral panic: teenagers who have gone or tried to travel overseas to support the fight in Syria and Iraq, along with a half dozen others held on terrorist peace bonds,” details of which have yet to be publicly revealed.
The naysayers will claim the sympathetic image of Omar is scheming, staged terrorist propaganda, in much the same sickening way CSIS agents, knowing that Omar had been softened up by weeks of frequent flyer program torture (sleep deprivation, moved to a new cell every three hours), mocked his tears and moans during their recorded interrogations. At one point in the infamous interrogation video made public by order of the Supreme Court, a CSIS agent tells a weeping, teenaged Khadr who cries, No one cares about me, that his injuries are not that bad, and that hes using his emotions as a devious strategy.
Dennis Edney, Khadrs lawyer, and the man in whose family home Khadr will now live while on bail, may be accused of over-the-top rhetoric in calling Harper a bigot who doesnt like Muslims. But he does have a point.
Khadr’s lifeline, by dint of birth, has been dictated by a complex series of geopolitical currents with Cold War roots, in which the people of Afghanistan became the weary, long-suffering victims of superpower proxy wars. They featured U.S.-funding of Osama bin Laden, constantly shifting alliances, and a 2001 invasion that saw thousands killed by U.S. aerial bombardment, terrifying night raids on village huts, transfers to torture, and other horrors that hardly made U.S. and Canadian forces the friendly liberators they pictured themselves to be.
The demonization of Omar Khadr and his family has always been based on a tenuous foundation at best. That some family members have made distasteful comments or unwise political choices (including the fathers association with former U.S. ally bin Laden) did not justify the torture of three of their sons or the paralysis of another brother at age 14. Likewise, it hardly placed them in the same category as individuals for whom the term war criminal makes far more sense, such as George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom are proud of creating a false pretext to invade and occupy Iraq, unrepentant about their complicity in torture, and welcome to come to Canada whenever they please.
But the demonization has been useful. In most of the secret trial security certificate cases against alleged terrorists, for example, a mere passing association with Khadr’s father, has been enough to condemn someone as a security threat. Indeed, individuals who met the Khadr patriarch in situations as innocuous as being in a carpool on a trip to Toronto, by attending the same mosque, or having one-time, culturally obligatory post-prayer tea, have all had such associations used as proof of terrorist threat.
The campaign to end those security certificates was largely successful because it presented the human face of the detainees and their families, who were no longer voiceless, eerily faded passport pictures, but flesh and blood individuals suffering years in solitary confinement without any due process. Perhaps applying lessons learned, the Canadian government refused Khadr access to the media once he returned to Canada and, apart from the small, dedicated group who provided the detainee with educational and other support opportunities, no one had ever heard the voice of the convicted war criminal whose silent teenage eyes peered out from book covers and media reports. Until last week, that is.
A Harper cabinet already in a morgue-like mood from the NDP victory in Alberta was now facing another blow to its house of cards. Seeing Khadr on his lawyers driveway was like witnessing the beginning of the end of a wrongful conviction case.
When asked what he would like Canadians to know about him, Khadr replied, Give me a chance to see who I am as a person, not as a name, and then they can make their own judgment after that.
In an age of the easy security smear, its the least we can do.
Matthew Behrens is a freelance writer and social justice advocate. He has worked closely with the targets of Canadian and U.S. national security profiling for many years.
