As you may have noticed in postings elsewhere on this blog, I find the concept of how Canada takes care of its citizens who choose to travel abroad very interesting.  I’ve taken the rather pessimistic view that if you’re a Canadian who leaves the country and doesn’t find that flag sewn onto your backpack to be adequate protection, you are pretty much out of luck – that our government, either by default or design, will not come to get you.

But it seems I may be wrong.  According to James Loney, writing in the November-December 2009 issue of This Magazine and himself a citizen who got into trouble abroad, it may be more a matter of who the Canadian government chooses to help and who they choose to ignore.

He cites the following examples in addition to his own experiences:

Brenda Martin: Canadian citizen, arrested in Mexico under potentially dubious circumstances.  Canadian government paid her fine and brought her home.

Omar Khadr: One of the most infamous of Canadian citizens to be left abroad in Guantanamo after he was arrested at the age of 15 more than eight years ago.  Ordered by a lower court to bring him home, the Canadian government has instead chosen to appeal each and every ruling which would compel them to do so.  Several blog posts on the subject in Mediaviber as well (here and here).

Abousfian Abdelrazik: Jailed, tortured and interrogated in the Sudan, apparently at CSIS’ request and with its full knowledge, for more than six years until a court order forced the Canadian government to bring him home.

Abdihakim Mohamed: Held in Kenya for more than three years now, this autistic 25 year old man allegedly doesn’t match his passport photo.

Suaad Hagi Mohamud: The most recent publicized example of someone who was stranded in Kenya for three months, jailed for a portion of that time, because the government felt that she didn’t match her passport photo.

There are more – both in Loney’s article, and no doubt if one were to do a bit more digging.

From what I have been able to gather, it seems that a government’s decision to intervene on a citizen’s behalf takes into consideration – in part – a few fundamental criteria.  (Author’s Note: These criteria are based on my own observations, readings and analysis rather than any list provided by the Canadian government or CSIS):

1. Did the citizen opt to travel into a country or region currently under a Canadian travel advisory?
2. What was the nature of the citizen’s offence, if any?
3. What kind of security risk would they pose to Canada if they were to be repatriated?
4. Is this person originally from Canada or did their first citizenship reside elsewhere?
5. If elsewhere, where was that else?

Loney sums it up effectively in his article, when he says:

They are part of an even longer list of Canadians in need of assistance. Who gets help and who doesn’t is a matter of “Crown prerogative.” That’s a fancy way of saying if the government likes you, if they see you as an upstanding citizen or a worthy innocent, they’ll go to bat for you. But if you have thick lips or dark skin, if you have a funny last name or you’re mentally ill, if you were born in a country with a bad reputation or if you yourself have a bad reputation, sorry, you’re out of luck. Some Canadian citizens count, it seems, and some don’t. Brenda and I must be among those who count.

He goes on to argue that all citizens need to be treated the same when it comes to running afoul of anything which threatens a Canadian when away from home.

My opinion?  I believe that Canadian citizenship is a privilege, something we should not take for granted.  That being said, I admit that I don’t have a high degree of confidence that my government would help me out if I had an issue when not on Canadian soil.

I will never forget actually having an issue when traveling in the Middle East about 20 years back.  I had crossed the border into Egypt from Israel.  On my way back into Israel again, my visa was changed such that the date I was supposed to leave the country was about a week before my flight was actually booked to depart.  I was worried and went to the Canadian Consulate.  After waiting several hours to see the Canadian representative, who basically shrugged and provided zero assistance, it was ultimately the Israeli receptionist who looked at the paper and told me it wouldn’t be an issue.

What if I had actually encountered a problem when I tried to leave though?  Who would have come to help me out – the receptionist?

Loney’s article makes for interesting reading.  Click on the link below to view the original.

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Read the original article, “Canada came to rescue me.  Why not Arar, Khadr, Mohamud?” which ran in the November-December 2009 issue of This Magazine.

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]]> http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/11/26/where-will-he-land/ Thu, 26 Nov 2009 16:00:32 +0000 Michael Friscolanti http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/11/26/where-will-he-land/ http://rogerhollander.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-administration-guts-its-own-argument-for-911-trials/ Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:41:09 +0000 rogerhollander http://rogerhollander.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/the-administration-guts-its-own-argument-for-911-trials/

Thursday, Nov 19, 2009 05:20 PST

(AP Photo\/Alex Brandon)

Attorney General Eric Holder testifies Wednesday on Capitol Hill before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Justice Department oversight.

(updated below – Update II)

 

“What I’m absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism” — Barack Obama, yesterday.

“Holder said five other Guantanamo detainees would be tried by military tribunals. The five include Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, who is accused of masterminding the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen; and Canadian Omar Khadr, accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan” — NPR, yesterday.

“‘Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions . . . . and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material’ . . . If true, that means that there are 75 so-called ‘Fifth Category’ detainees who might be subject to indefinite detention without trial” – The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, yesterday, quoting The Washington Post.

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Can anyone reconcile Obama’s homage to “our legal traditions” and his professed faith in jury trials in the New York federal courts with the reality of what his administration is doing:  i.e., denying trials to a large number of detainees, either by putting them before military commissions or simply indefinitely imprisoning them without any process at all?

During his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Eric Holder struggled all day to justify his decision to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial because he has no coherent principle to invoke.  He can’t possibly defend the sanctity of jury trials in our political system — the most potent argument justifying what he did — since he’s the same person who is simultaneously denying trials to Guantanamo detainees by sending them to military commissions and even explicitly promising that some of them will be held without charges of any kind.

Once you endorse the notion that the Government has the right to imprison people not captured on any battlefield without giving them trials — as the Obama administration is doing explicitly and implicitly — what convincing rationale can anyone offer to justify giving Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants a real trial in New York?  If you’re taking the position that military commissions and even indefinite detention are perfectly legitimate tools to imprison people — as Holder has done — then what is the answer to the Right’s objections that Mohammed himself belongs in a military commission?  If the administration believes Omar Khadr belongs in a military commission, and if they believe others can be held indefinitely without any charges, why isn’t that true of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?  By denying jury trials to a large number of detainees, Obama officials have completely gutted their own case for why they did the right thing in giving Mohammed a trial in New York.

Even worse, Holder was reduced to admitting — even boasting — that this concocted multi-tiered justice system (trials for some, commissions for others, indefinite detention for the rest) enables the Government to pick and choose what level of due process someone gets based on the Government’s assessment as to where and how they’re most likely to get a conviction:

 

Courts and commissions are both essential tools in our fight against terrorism . . . On the same day I sent these five defendants to federal court, I referred five others to be tried in military commissions.  I am a prosecutor, and as a prosecutor, my top priority was simply to select the venue where the government will have the greatest opportunity to present the strongest case with the best law. . . . At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is a federal court.

Does that remotely sound like a “justice system”?  If you’re accused of being a Terrorist, there’s not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based on ensuring that it will win.  Even worse, Holder repeatedly assured Senators that the administration would continue to imprison 9/11 defendants even in the very unlikely case that they were acquitted, citing what they previously suggested was their Orwellian authority of so-called “post-acquittal detention powers.”  Is there any better definition of a “show trial” than one in which the defendant has no chance of ever being released even if acquitted, because the Government will simply thereafter assert the power to hold him indefinitely without charges?

I understand that sending even a limited number of Terrorism suspects to federal court is politically difficult and controversial, as the last couple of days have demonstrated.  But by refusing to embrace and defend the core principle of justice at stake here — that a distinguishing feature of our political system is that we don’t imprison or kill people without charging them with a crime and proving their guilt in a real court, and that military commissions and indefinite detention are un-American (which Democrats argued under Bush) — the Obama administration has made it far more difficult for it to defend what it is doing, as well as for those who want to defend their decision to give trials to 9/11 defendants.

To see how that works, here is part of the exchange I had on MSNBC this week with George Pataki, while debating trials for 9/11 defendants:

 

MR. GREENWALD:  If you look at how the British treated the people who did the London subway bombings, the Spanish who treated the people who did the Madrid subway bombings — even India just put on trial the sole surviving terrorist who perpetrated the Mumbai massacre last year. Even Indonesia gave trials in their real cities to the people who blew up the nightclubs in Bali.

It’s only the American conservatives who are feeding the terrorist agenda by saying that we’re too scared to hold trials –

MR. RATIGAN: Hold on, Glenn.

MR. PATAKI: Can I respond to that, Dylan? Only the — only the — only the American conservatives? Then tell me why Obama and Holder are using military tribunals against those who blow up Americans in acts of war overseas? They’re just picking these particular terrorists for trial in New York because they blew up civilians in New York. So what their logic is, “Kill thousands of civilians and you can get a civilian trial; kill one or two overseas, and we’re going to use military tribunals.”

That makes no sense.

For those wanting to defend the administration, what’s the answer to that?  The same thing happened when Rep. Nadler, as part of the same segment, tried to defend the Obama administration’s decision to try the 9/11 defendants in New York:

 

REP. NADLER:  I think that our tradition is that people accused of heinous crimes get trials, and they get trials in the area in which the crime is committed, which is right here. And I think it’s exactly the right thing to do. . . .That’s the way it ought to be, and we ought to show the world that we adhere to our traditions of justice and that these terrorists are not going to cause us to abandon the law.

MR. PATAKI: … We are going to use military tribunals. They’re saying they’re perfectly fine for some terrorists, but these terrorists they’re going to try here. What’s the justification for that, Jerry?

REP. NADLER: Well, I — well, I don’t think there is any justification.

MR. PATAKI: I don’t either.

The administration should have the courage of its convictions and defend jury trials as a linchpin of American justice, which would entail giving them to all Terrorism suspects not captured on any battlefield.  But by refusing to do so — by exhibiting the very cowardice of which Holder accused Republicans, i.e. denying Terrorism suspects a trial — the administration has no cogent argument to make in its own defense.  It’s just another case of the administration wanting to bask in the rhetorical glory of “the rule of law” while simultaneously trampling on it for petty political convenience.

 

UPDATE: The blogger Patterico — who, notably, is a prosectuor himself and thus inclined to be empathetic with prosecutorial goals — nonetheless compiles additional evidence to criticize Holder’s decision as follows:

 

You can see that what we have is an administration that is choosing where to try the detainees, not based on some principle or neutral protocol (as they claim), but based on where they can win. They’re rigging the game.

And if they lose, they won’t let him go anyway.

This is just further evidence that the KSM trial will be a show trial.

It’s worth reading the arguments from a prosecutor about why the administration’s conduct is such a breach of basic justice, even as they cynically wrap themselves in the rhetoric of the sanctity of jury trials and the rule of law.

 

UPDATE II:  For a crystal clear refutation of the claim that it’s normal to use military commissions for the crimes at issue here, see this comment from the always-enlightening Pow Wow, which is based on this equally enlightening interview by Marcy Wheeler of Lt. Col (and now-Law Professor) David Frakt, highlighting the numerous myths on which the case for military commissions is predicated.

November 16, 2009

AUNG SAN SUU KYI, OMAR KHADR, AND BARACK OBAMA: A DREADFUL TALE OF WHAT AMERICA HAS BECOME

John Chuckman

During his trip to Asia, President Obama called for the government of Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi, a noted dissident who has spent years under house arrest.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.  

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama’s call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama’s arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America’s military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma’s treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America’s treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn’t done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar’s experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America’s Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic’s, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America’s own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back?  One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let’s go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America’s carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist – an American no less – with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America’s brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial “victory”: tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be “questioned.”

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else’s country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America’s hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America’s ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as “bitches” by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.    

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America’s establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama’s White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President’s, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy’s chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America’s secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA’s vast international torture gulag, is anybody’s guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA’s euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world’s hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying “you can bank on it,” and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America’s soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.     

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan’s airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America’s flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

US Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced that five detainees would be moved from Guantanamo Bay to New York, where they would stand trial for carrying out the 9/11 attacks. However, five other detainees will continue to be tried before military commissions, which have lower standards of evidence. The five detainees coming to New York have previously indicated they intend to plead guilty, although the five to be tried before military commissions have not.

The New York five are:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed;

Ramzi bin al-Shibh;

Ali Abdul Aziz Ali;

Mustafa al-Hawsawi; and

Khallad bin Attash.

They indicated their intention to plead guilty at a hearing in Gunatanamo on 8 December 2008.

According to this McClatchy article, the five Holder says will be tried before military commissions are:

Ibrahim al Qosi, who is trying to have incriminating statements he says were made under torture/coercion suppressed and wants to go home to Sudan;

Omar Khadr, who is fighting the charges against him. His lawyers claim most of the evidence against him is based on statements he made under coercion;

Ahmed al Darbi, who says he was tortured into confessing;

Noor Uthman Mohammed, who denied many of the charges against him; and

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who says he’s innocent and was also tortured into confessing.

As I pointed out earlier today, there is a lot of evidence against al-Nashiri. However, based on what I know of the Khadr case, he would stand a very good chance of acquittal, unless the bar was lowered from beyond reasonable doubt to “I guess he might have done it.” The other three to be tried before military commissions I don’t know much about.

Is it just a coincidence that the five detainees who have indicated they intend to plead guilty are going to New York, but the ones that are fighting the charges are getting military commissions?

Let me get this straight. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 terror attacks, gets a fair trial with all the constitutional trimmings. But Omar Khadr, the Canadian child-soldier accused of killing an American sergeant during battle, will still be tried before a kangaroo court. Incidentally, the kangaroo court label isn’t mine. That’s how U.S. military lawyers describe the commission that is supposed to try the 23-year-old Toronto man. As Lt.-Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a former military commission prosecutor, wrote last month in a letter to the Washington Post, these bodies were designed “to secure convictions where prisoner mistreatment … would otherwise preclude them.” True, President Barack Obama has eliminated some of their worst elements. Under amendments passed into law last month, the military commission that tries Khadr will no longer be able to use information gained under torture. So that’s something. But as the American Civil Liberties Union has pointed out, the law still permits evidence obtained through both hearsay and coercion, as long as this coercion does not involve “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Neither hearsay nor coercion will be permissible in the civilian trial of alleged mass murderer Mohammed. Neither is permissible in a military court martial. But both may be allowed in the trial of Khadr, who at the age of 15 was sent off by his father to aid pro-Taliban forces resisting the American-led invasion of Afghanistan. Why the difference? U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder insists he merely wants to differentiate between those accused of attacking civilians and those charged with crimes against the military. He says that’s why Mohammed, accused of bringing down the twin towers, will be tried by a civilian court in Manhattan. And he says that’s why Khadr and four others charged with attacking U.S. soldiers will be tried by military commissions. This is the excuse. The real reason, I suspect, is that Washington knows that 9/11 ringleaders like Mohammed will be happy to publicly acknowledge their crimes, thus making their convictions a near certainty. But Khadr is not angling for martyrdom. And in a real court of law, the case against him would almost certainly fail. First there is his age. Fifteen at the time of his capture, he would be considered a child soldier under United Nations conventions (military commissions are specifically entitled to disregard this). Second, as my colleague Michelle Shephard writes in her book, Guantanamo’s Child, Khadr – seriously wounded in the Afghan firefight – was in such bad shape during questioning that even his U.S. interrogator feared he might die. In civilian court, statements obtained under such circumstances would be dismissed as coerced. Lurking behind all of this is the Canadian government’s obdurate refusal, in Parliament and the courts, to request his repatriation. It’s not clear that the U.S. would agree to such a request if one were made. Holder was deliberately opaque when asked yesterday, saying only “we will, as that case proceeds, see how it should be ultimately treated.” What we do know, however, is that after seven years in custody in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, this particular Canadian citizen is heading for a low-level show trial. Shame on Obama for keeping the military commission farce alive. Shame on Canada for failing to object. Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

The alleged mastermind of the September 11th attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be tried for his crimes in New York City. Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, and Ramzi Bin al-Shib will be tried by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. 5 other detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison (Omar Khadr, Mohammed Kamin, Ibrahim al Qosi, Noor Uthman Muhammed and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri) will be tried by a military commission, CNN. Profile: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, BBC News.

In Canada, the Supreme Court is hearing an appeal by the government that seeks to remove an order by a lower court that Canada must do everything possible to bring Omar Khadr back to Canada. Khadr is a  Canadian citizen who was captured as a child soldier in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old. He has been held in Guantanamo for the past 8 years, Toronto Star.  Watch the hearing live on C-SPAN2.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will hold a press conference about Guantanamo Bay detainee trials at 11am EST today. Watch live on C-SPAN.

The U.S. seized a New York City skyscraper and 4 mosques suspected of illegally funneling money to Iran today. The buildings were under the control of an Iranian foundation that was set up during the reign of the Shah of Iran. After a coup displaced the Shah in 1979, the members of the foundation were replaced with supporters of the current government, ABC News.  The U.S. also renewed financial sanctions against Iran yesterday, Reuters.

“The Harper government is warning the Supreme Court of Canada against becoming the first court in the western world to declare that a government has a legal duty to protect its citizens detained abroad.” – The National Post.

“Canadian courts should not be used to lobby the government to exercise its discretion in a particular way,” says the Justice Department’s legal brief. This is a perfect example of the Harper government “do as I say not as I do” logic.

All of this happened before Stephen Harper got on a plane and flew to Asia. Today the Supreme Court of Canada will rule on the Omar Khadr case, if they side with Khadr the Harper government will be forced to do the right thing and start defending Canadians being held abroad. Stephen Harper has spent millions of tax dollars keeping Mr. Khadr, a Canadian, in Guantanamo Bay, an American prison where they torture suspects.

Since the Supreme Court’s decision could be “embarrassing” for the Harper government so the Prime Minister decided to go to Asia for the first time in his four years in office.

It is excellent news that the PM has finally decided to pay a visit to India and Singapore (though he isn’t going to China but who really cares about a fast growing economy of over a billion consumers) but it should not be forgotten that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is only doing the right thing because he is a coward.

The question(s) of the day:

How will the supreme court rule?

Will Stephen Harper mess up the nuclear energy deal with India like he messed up Canada’s economy?

How will the media cover all of this and will the Khadr ruling supercede the Prime Minister’s carefully choreographed Asia trip?