When former president Barack Obama initiated efforts to implement his pledge to close Guantánamo Bay and transfer its detainees to U.S. and foreign prisons, he started a cascade effect that has boosted the global jihadist insurgency. The most recent example of the impact of Obama’s foreign policy comes from just across the 49th parallel. On the Fourth of July, news broke that an Obama acolyte—Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau—would offer a historic settlement and official apology to a former Guantánamo Bay inmate. Trudeau’s Liberal government secretly awarded C$10.5 million to Omar Khadr, a man convicted of war crimes and the murder of an American soldier; Guantánamo’s youngest detainee is now 30 years old and living in Edmonton, Alberta.
The case of Omar Khadr is as provocative as it is unusual. Khadr was born in Toronto, a Canadian citizen, but his Egyptian-Palestinian family spent most of Khadr’s childhood in Pakistan. Khadr was brought up under the guidance of a mother who preferred her children be raised not in Canada but in an al Qaeda training camp and a father intent on grooming his seven children to participate in jihad. The father, Ahmed Said al-Khadr, was a senior al Qaeda officer and financier described by his wife as an “old friend” of Osama bin Laden. The Khadr family once lived in the bin Laden compound, and the al Qaeda leader himself attended the wedding of the eldest Khadr daughter, Zaynab—an unabashed Islamist who has expressed her own support for the 9/11 mastermind. Another son, Abdurahman Khadr, who took a different path than Omar and has worked with American intelligence agencies, told PBS he grew up “in an al Qaeda family.”
By the age of 15, Omar Khadr was in Afghanistan, attending jihadist training camps and meeting with senior al Qaeda figures, including bin Laden. He had taken part in a number of operations meant to kill or injure U.S. forces. He was captured following a gunfight between plain-clothed terrorists and U.S. Delta Force soldiers at an al Qaeda compound near Khost, Afghanistan. After the battle, American army medics were sent in to tend to any survivors, and Khadr threw a grenade that killed one of those medics, Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer. Khadr himself faced life-threatening injuries from gun wounds; he survived only because he was treated by U.S. medics who made it through the firefight.
Khadr was airlifted to Bagram, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, where he received further medical attention and was subject to initial questioning. Here Khadr stated that “he felt happy when he heard he had killed an American” and signed a statement of facts confessing to the murder of Sgt. Speer. Khadr later claimed the confession was the result of torture and coercion, but a military judge ruled that Khadr signed the statement after he learned investigators had found a videotape showing him building IEDs. Khadr was transferred to Guantánamo—his home for the next decade—where he was held, interrogated, and prosecuted in a military tribunal. He was found guilty in 2010 of five counts of war crimes, including the murder of Sgt. Speer.
Rather than letting him serve the 40-year sentence handed down by the military tribunal, however, Khadr’s lawyers negotiated a plea deal, and the Obama administration reportedly began pressuring Canada to accept custody of Khadr. Years later, it was revealed through Hillary Clinton’s leaked private emails that she and her staff had personally intervened and encouraged Canadian officials to repatriate Khadr.
In 2012, Khadr was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Canada, and by 2015, he was released on bail by the country’s notoriously liberal court system. Meanwhile, Khadr and his lawyers had filed a civil lawsuit against the government of Canada, alleging that it had failed to uphold his rights as a Canadian citizen. The country’s Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that the Canadian government had indeed infringed upon Khadr’s rights when it sent its own interrogators to Guantánamo to question, as the court’s opinion put it, “a youth detained without access to counsel, to elicit statements about serious criminal charges while knowing that the youth had been subjected to sleep deprivation and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the prosecutors.” Khadr first sought C$100,000 in damages in his civil suit; he later raised the amount to C$20 million. The Supreme Court ruling, however, said nothing about financial compensation, “leaving it to the government to decide how best to respond” and noting that the “remedy sought” by Khadr was “an order that Canada request his repatriation.”
The question therefore remains: Was Trudeau’s Independence Day decision a deliberate provocation and an anti-American gesture or simply an unassuming, if not naïve, attempt to right an extraordinary wrong? The answer to this question depends largely upon one’s view of Omar Khadr. Some see him as a traitor who defected to fight alongside the enemy, an al Qaeda terrorist and a convicted war criminal, while others see a victim, a brainwashed son and a former child soldier.
Those who defend the Trudeau government’s payment to Omar Khadr rely upon two essential propositions. First, they assert, Khadr was a child soldier and should therefore be treated differently from other terrorists captured and detained at Guantánamo. And second, Khadr’s advocates say that his confession and admission of guilt were the result of torture and routine rights violations, and should not be upheld as a true guilty plea.
A close examination of the facts, however, shows that both assertions are myths that do not hold up to basic scrutiny.
The idea that Khadr was a “child soldier” has been repeated so often in the Canadian media, it’s now met without question or skepticism. Courts deal with 15-year-olds all the time, and frequently, these adolescents are tried as adults. In the case of Omar Khadr, the American judicial system deemed that he possessed the mental capacity to be aware of his actions. Khadr knew what he was doing when he persuaded his father to let him fight in Afghanistan, when he built and laid improvised bombs, when he threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer, and when he told American interrogators that he acted “with the specific intent of killing or injuring as many Americans as he could.”
Khadr was tried and convicted of war crimes. While some cry foul, Canadian Constitution Foundation executive director Howard Anglin, who served as deputy chief of staff to former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, says Khadr’s prosecution is “neither unprecedented nor contrary to international law.” Khadr did not meet the legal definition of child soldier per international law, maintains Anglin, who provided expert testimony in front of a Canadian parliamentary committee discussing Omar Khadr in May 2008. Anglin, acting as a lawyer and a private citizen, testified that “as Mr. Khadr’s own lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Kuebler, has stated, there is nothing in the optional protocol, customary international law, U.S. federal law, or Canadian law that bars the prosecution of a juvenile for war crimes.”
Anglin points out that while most scholars of the subject of child soldiers acknowledge that armed forces should work to prevent individuals under the age of 18 from engaging in combat, and many would decline to prosecute soldiers under the age of 15, nowhere in international law does it say “those between the ages of 15 and 18 can never be soldiers.” Anglin notes that, “for example, the United Kingdom expressly reserved the right to use soldiers under the age of 18 when there was a genuine military need.” Furthermore, these guidelines typically define the rules for recruitment and combat for adolescents in signatory countries. They do not prohibit fighting against adolescent or child soldier enemies who are already in combat, which would be unworkable and impossible.
Khadr was not a child but an adolescent while fighting for al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it’s worth noting that Khadr was not a soldier either. According to Geneva Convention definitions, al Qaeda does not meet the standard of a legal army and does not operate according to the laws and customs of war. Khadr was not a member of an organized militia or recognized armed forces, he was not a uniformed soldier, he was not part of a chain of command, and he did not conduct operations in accordance with the Geneva Convention. In other words, Khadr was an unlawful combatant, a terrorist—and terrorists do not have Geneva rights.
The second prevailing myth about Khadr is that he was tortured during his detention in Guantánamo Bay. According to J. D. Gordon, a former Pentagon spokesman and retired Navy commander familiar with this case, “Omar Khadr was treated humanely at Guantánamo.” Gordon escorted members of NGOs and the media attending Khadr’s military commission hearings at Guantánamo and saw something far more cynical in the works. “His claims of torture were merely ploys to gain sympathy and secure his release—a tactic taken straight out of the Manchester Manual, an al Qaeda training document seized by authorities in the U.K.”
Gordon is not alone in his position that Khadr was not tortured. One of Canada’s top human rights scholars and Trudeau’s predecessor as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff, defended the methods used in interrogating Khadr at the time. The so-called “frequent flyer program”—which prevented Khadr from sleeping for more than three hours at a time—does not amount to torture, Ignatieff declared. “Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental or physical health,” he wrote of American enhanced interrogation techniques.
Omar Khadr was considered a “high intelligence value” detainee, according to Guantánamo reports made public through WikiLeaks. Khadr possessed important information in the war against Islamist terror groups. Given his family history, his father’s high-ranking position within al Qaeda, and his own connections to senior terrorists, Khadr was routinely questioned, including using enhanced interrogation methods. No one denies this.
The only court ever to rule on whether Khadr was tortured explicitly found that “there is no credible evidence the accused [Khadr] was ever tortured . . . even using a liberal interpretation considering the accused’s age.”
Khadr and his lawyers concocted a long list of alleged acts of torture committed by American officials, yet Khadr refused to testify in court to describe the alleged assaults against him. One of these claims, that Khadr was abused during a weigh-in at Guantánamo, was specifically disproven by Judge Patrick J. Parrish. “The accused alleged in his affidavit that he was mistreated while he was being weighed. The videotape of the accused being weighed . . . clearly shows the accused was not abused or mistreated in any way by any of the guards.”
During his years at Guantánamo, Omar Khadr amassed a team of advocates and supporters. He became the poster child for an anti-American, antiwar lobby that seeks to make excuses for and minimize the threat of Islamist terror networks. He has been canonized as a martyr amongst legal and academic circles: the child soldier left to rot at Guantánamo. As emails show, even Hillary Clinton, the supposed realist in the Obama administration, fell victim to Khadr’s carefully crafted image.
But the true story of Omar Khadr is darker, his deeds more deliberate than his advocates would like the public to believe. While some in Canada call the settlement a polarizing issue—most journalists and academics side with Khadr—a recent Angus Reid poll revealed that an overwhelming 71 percent of Canadians disagree with Trudeau’s decision to compensate Khadr. Elites in Canada may feel conflicted about balancing the rights of a convicted terrorist with protecting national security in the era of a global jihadist insurgency, but everyday Canadians see the issue more clearly. Khadr was an enemy combatant; he murdered an American soldier; and he possessed useful information about al Qaeda operations. He was treated humanely in Guantánamo, and his repatriation back to Canada in 2012 was frankly more than he deserved.
Instead, he is now C$10.5 million richer and free to spend this money, except perhaps for lawyers’ fees, however he chooses. (He has indicated he has no intention of paying anything toward the $134 million judgment against him in a civil suit won by Sgt. Speer’s widow and Sgt. First Class Layne Morris, who lost an eye in the firefight that killed his colleague.) J. D. Gordon says, given Khadr’s upbringing and the family business, don’t be surprised if that includes “stealthily recruiting more jihadists through speaking tours and other activities designed to spread propaganda about America and our allies.”
Upon his release from prison in 2015, Khadr was asked if he would categorically denounce violent jihad. “It’s not something I believe in right now,” said a coy Khadr. Right now. The Trudeau government should hope, in the wake of this highly publicized and deeply unpopular cash settlement, that violent jihad is not something Omar Khadr ever revisits.
Candice Malcolm is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Toronto Sun and a fellow with the Center for a Secure Free Society.
