I admit to being slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. Many of us here in Soviet Canuckistan, the one major U.S. ally unwilling to say a peep about America’s human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, are slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. I’m not sure if the Khadr family—”Canada’s First Family of Terrorism”—gets as much press down south as they do here, but it was fascinating to watch public opinion change its tune in recent months as first, a military judge threw out the war crimes charges against him last June, and then in February, the not-at-all-surprising revelation that while he had been present at the firefight that killed a U.S. soldier, there was no actual evidence that he threw the grenade. Neither Canadians nor our government have been particularly sympathetic towards the Khadrs, even though Omar was only 15 when the Americans shot and captured him, even though we tend to wring our hands a fair bit over the plight of child soldiers (when they’re attacking someone else, that is). But Michelle Sheppard, the author of Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, is one of the good ones as far as the mainstream media is concerned. Her clear-headed, honest reporting on the case for the Toronto Star has been a breath of fresh air, so of course I was thrilled when her book came out.
It did not disappoint. Sheppard has a keen eye for detail, and she manages to track every key moment in the Khadr’s lives. She paints a vivid detail of the years leading up to the firefight in Afghanistan, as Omar is dragged by his parents between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Canada, indoctrinated into his father’s ideology even as he clings to the trappings of a Western childhood. The descriptions of Guantanamo, of course, are horrific, confirming much of what we already know goes on within those walls:
One evening in March 2003, Omar was taken from his cell and in no mood to co-operate. The guards left him in the interrogation booth for hours, short-shackled with his ankles and wrists bound together and secured to a bolt on the floor. Unable to move, he eventually urinated and was left in a pool of urine on the floor.
When the MPs returned and found the soiled teenager, Omar’s lawyers later said, the guards poured pine oil cleaner on his chest and the floor. Keeping him short-shackled, the guards used Omar as a human mop to clean up the mess. Omar was returned to his cell and for two days the guards refused to give him fresh clothes.
(If you have the stomach to read it, Rolling Stone has more here.)
Beyond telling a gripping, heartbreaking story, Sheppard is also courageous in tackling the motivations of terrorism. By tracing the Khadr family history and Ahmed Said Khadr’s path from being a secular Muslim primarily interested in charity work to the guy that Osama bin Laden kept snubbing at al-Qaeda get-togethers, she of course brings up the West’s involvement in the rise of Islamic extremism and questions what exactly it is that we’re doing in Afghanistan in the first place.
Omar, now 21, has spent a fifth of his life in America’s off-shore gulag. He is the only Western citizen remaining there. Slightly more moral countries have demanded the extradition or repatriation of their citizens, but despite the urging of Amnesty International, UNICEF, and the Canadian Bar Association, Canada has not. Our government has, in fact, acted in a rather callous manner to one of its own citizens. After Omar’s arrest:
Foreign Affairs media director Lillian Thomsen, on instructions from Colleen Swords, now head of the intelligence division, wrote in an email a new press message must “claw back on the fact that he is a minor.”
(The spin hasn’t worked, by the way. A poll last year revealed that slightly more than half of Canadians believe the government should ask for Omar’s repatriation. It’s somewhat of a relief to know that Canadians have more empathy than our minority government.)
Guantanamo’s Child is a brutal read (and for me, all the more depressing since I’ve started working with kids around Omar’s age), but one I hope will be ultimately worthwhile. Sheppard does a phenomenal job of laying out the argument that Omar is a child soldier in need of rehabilitation, not imprisonment and torture, as well as the ethical and legal case against Guantanamo Bay.
Highly recommended.
Recently