The Gazette's advice concerning Omar Khadr's rehabilitation is appropriate and every effort should be made to rehabilitate this man when he returns to Canada. He has seen terrible things at Guantanamo, things that should never have happened and it is this as much as his participation in violence that stands to influence him.
Many of us are familiar with the criminal actions of United States’ and allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, which include wholesale torture of innocent men, women and even children in Iraq's Bagram and Abu Graib prisons, wanton killing of people at checkpoints in Iraq, killing of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan by remote control from safe havens, killing of entire wedding parties and other large groups through mistaken identity and, among others, the imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo of at least 800 men and boys, some over 90 and as young as 12 who were simply kidnapped by Afghans and Pakistanis and sold to the Americans.
But the recent Wikileaks documents from the United State's own files makes clear that criminal abuse was not restricted to these publicized cases but were common in the many Pentagon and CIA detention camps around the world. Tens of thousands of innocent people were rounded up and incarcerated for years in subhuman conditions, tortured and restrained without benefit of counsel or any semblance of a trial.
Books have been and will be written on the subject by those victims that have survived and are in condition to undertake the ordeal of recounting these experiences. Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany who wrote Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo, was held in several prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo. The account of his experiences is horrendous and they are substantiated by the testimony of others. He claims that doctors and dentists were part of the program of torture and prison guard abuse sanctioned by the government of George W. Bush and, apparently, perpetuated by that of Barack Obama.
So while we are concerned about Khadr, who from many accounts appears to be an exceptional person with a generally positive outlook and "Canadian" by temperament and interests, how much more concerned should we be about the reintegration into civil society of those who took part and/or witnessed so much brutality for so poor and unjust a cause. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a condition now plaguing the United States. By many accounts it is under-recognized and under-treated. On a lesser scale but no less important, Canada has this problem as well, so we should not be distracted by all this attention on Khadr's reintegration into civil society into believing the problem ends with him. Julian Assange's brave actions should remind us of the real human degradation of war as opposed to the sunny forecasts and apologetics of warmongers.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
