John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE NATIONAL POST AND
PROMPTLY REMOVED
This man’s words are pathetically ignorant special pleading
and, in publishing them, the National Post shows how far it will go to stir up the
right-wing against the proper working of justice. The comments generated by the
article, the ones left posted, resemble an orgy of right-wing hate-masturbation.
You go to war, sometimes you get wounded. You don't whine
and snivel about it long afterward, even more so when you were a paid
professional killer in America’s special services, as this man was.
The man was a Green Beret, the guys who made their wonderful
reputation crawling around at night in the jungles of Vietnam to sneak into
villages and cut civilian officials’ throats. They were part of the CIA’s
Project Phoenix which included perhaps 40,000 such brave and honorable acts.
But here he is, whining about a 15-year old who was caught
up in the bloody mess of war, as though he were a criminal.
Omar Khadr is not a criminal, full stop.
Otherwise every soldier and volunteer who ever went to a
foreign war is a criminal, and there are hundreds of thousands of them,
including many who ran off to Israel’s various wars to help the IDF kill Arabs.
But they are not treated as criminals by the law.
It has never been the practice, after a war is over, for the
winners to try the losers as criminals, unless flagrant war crimes were
involved, and even then, it generally has not been the practice.
The United States has itself behaved as a massive war criminal
in Western Asia. War after war. Threat after threat. Killing after killing. Massacres.
Assassinations. And plenty of torture. The "laws" of war were broken
countless times by the United States, and then it had the arrogance to try
others for war crimes after torturing them for confessions, including a child,
no less.
Only recently, it has been confirmed that a million souls
perished in America’s totally illegal invasion of Iraq. Criminal acts do not come
a great deal larger than that, but no one received years of confinement and
torture for being part of them, much less planning and authorizing them.
This young man was fifteen when American soldiers shot him -
twice in the back, a little detail often left out in the telling of the story.
Then they shipped him off for years of torture and isolation
in Guantanamo, denying him for a long time all Red Cross-guaranteed rights. His
interrogator was a Nazi-like American who made this kid sit up - pulling at his
serious and unhealed wounds each time he brutally questioned him, and that
after sleep-deprivation.
After years of abuse and without a hope of improving his
situation, Khadr finally gave his torturers what they wanted and confessed to
killing an American. I am virtually certain he did not kill anyone, but even if
he did, he was a mere child and in a war the United States launched. The U.S. in
its abuse of him has violated countless laws, including violating the UN Treaty
on Child Soldiers, the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War, and Red Cross International
Conventions on the Rights of Prisoners.
If you want a world governed by law, then you yourself must
live by the law. Otherwise, we have international anarchy where might makes right
and where America feels free to tell everyone, everywhere what they can and can’t
do and even decide who may live and who may die.
And this man who is whining about Khadr’s finally receiving
bail was himself nothing less than part of America’s bloody enforcement mechanism.
Thank God for a Canadian judge with some courage and proper
legal values. A lot of the most beloved qualities of our Canada have suffered
under the hateful government of Stephen Harper, but every once in a while it’s
nice to see the old values shine through the gloom.
