Omar Khadr Transferred from Gitmo to Canada

By Jeralyn, Section Terror Detainees
Posted on Sat Sep 29, 2012 at 02:00:54 PM EST
Tags: Omar Khadr, Guantanamo (all tags)

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Finally, Omar Khadr, the "child of Jihad" has left Guantanamo and returned home to Canada.

He was transferred to the Millhaven Institution, a maximum security prison in Bath, Ont. His lawyer says he is happy to be home.

Omar was 15 when he was captured and sent to Guantanamo. He is now 26. He pleaded guilty at Gitmo in 2010, receiving an 8 year sentence which specified he would be eligible to return to Canada after one year. Now in Canada, he will be eligible to apply for parole after one year. [More...]

His repatriation documents are here. Canada remains concerned about several issues with respect to granting him parole:

The minister said Khadr "idealizes his father" and appears to deny Ahmed Khadr's "lengthy history of terrorist action and association with al-Qaeda.
He also said Omar Khadr's mother and older sister have "openly applauded his crimes and terrorist activities.

All of our coverage of his case is accessible here.

On his family:

A "Who's Who" of his family, with pictures, is here. Details of his coercive treatment are here. An 81 page defense motion, detailing his case and torture/coercive treatment, including an affidavit by Omar is here.

As former Blogger Jeanne D'Arc wrote back in 2006:

The problem is, Omar Khadr is as much a victim of these people as a member of the family. He's eighteen years old. When he was captured in Afghanistan, he was fifteen -- a child turned into a soldier by parents from hell. And our government's response to this victim of child abuse was to abuse him further.

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Omar Khadr Transferred from Gitmo to Canada | 2 comments (2 topical)

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Abdurahman Khadr (none / 0) (#1)
by RickyJim on Sat Sep 29, 2012 at 06:21:34 PM EST

Abddurahman, an older brother, was the subject of a PBS Frontline program in 2004 called "Son of Al Qaeda". In it he explains growing up in Afghanistan with bin Laden's children and how he later became a CIA agent and agreed to spy on jihadis in Guantanamo. The last thing I could find out about him by googling is that he got married in 2010 and works in Toronto.

Now That We've Perfected Torture (none / 0) (#2)
by john horse on Sat Sep 29, 2012 at 10:43:09 PM EST

I was struck by this bit of information regarding Khadr's abuse and torture by the Bush administration.

The design of Omar Khadr's life at Guantanamo Bay apparently began as a theory in the minds of Air Force researchers. After the Korean War, the Air Force created a program called SERE -- Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape -- to help captured pilots resist interrogation. SERE's founders wanted to know what kind of torture was most destructive to the human psyche so that they could train pilots to withstand it.

So we took research that could help our pilots withstand torture and instead used our knowledge of what torture is the "most destructive to the human psyche" to more effectively torture our own prisoners. What I'm wondering is now that we've perfected torture, are we going to share this knowledge with other governments? I'm sure that there are plenty of dictators and despots who can benefit from this knowledge too (sarcasm alert).