He's also a Canadian citizen, albeit one whose plight has been largely ignored by Canada's reigning governments.
Indeed, successive Canadian governments have refused to seek extradition or repatriation despite the fact that groups like Amnesty International urged doing so. In fact, not only did Canada fail him - as established by the Canadian Cabinet, the Federal Court of Canada, and then the Supreme Court of Canada, resptively - we've spent $1.3 million making sure that he stays in Guantanamo... Rather than fighting for his Charter Rights.
According to the buzz in the media, he's about to plead to a lesser charge. As a result, he'll serve eight years, and will likely be made to withhold any formal accusations of torture - much like what happened with John Walker Lindh's own plea bargain.
I'm not going to talk about this, though, because I'm sure there are plenty of news sites, and plenty of other blogs, where you can hear all about this stuff. Instead, I'm going to focus on a narrative I fear is about to grow through certain media sources - one which I find incredibly ugly, particularly given everything this young man has already been forced to endure.
There are certain groups who are doing their level best to make sure Khadr's repatriation won't happen. This includes one purported "expert on evil" by the name of Dr. Michael Welner:
In an exclusive interview, Dr. Michael Welner says Khadr is known to have expressed peace-loving intentions only to "those advancing his public image" from behind the razor wire at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Welner also discounts much-cited comments by some U.S. guards at Guantanamo that the Toronto native is a "good kid" and "salvageable" - calling them "shallow in their prognostic significance."
"When one leaps to the conclusion about Omar Khadr's future because he is friendly, one might recall that Osama bin Laden has always been described as gentle, likable and charming," New York-based Welner told Postmedia News.
"There is no record of (Khadr's) publicly repudiating al-Qaida, as civilized Muslims should, not even a letter composed for him by Dennis Edney," he added in a reference to one of Khadr's two Canadian lawyers. There is "no call . . . to radical Islamists to mature beyond their elemental intolerance."
Welner, 46, spoke as the Canadian government faces the prospect of soon receiving a call for Khadr to be transferred to a Canadian jail in the event he is convicted of war crimes charges he faces in a Guantanamo military commission.
This Doctor, and I use the term loosely, has created what he calls "the Depravity Scale," purportedly a "achieve a scientific-legal standardization of evil." I expect this Doctor, again a term I'm using loosely, will get a lot of face-time from certain news sources.
Let's be clear, though: The man's a quack. There's no such thing as a scientific measure of evil. The whole idea doesn't even make any sense.
Looking through the sources Welner used to build his scale reveals all of a single reference to an actual, academic journal (Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law). His scale never went through any sort of peer-review process, either - it was an editorial. This is exactly as scientific as measuring someone's skull to determine whether they're likely to commit murder. Or, to use a more modern example, diluting medicine to make it more effective.
And yet Dr. Welner is trying to use this system he invented whole-cloth from his imagination to make Khadr's situation even more miserable.
This poor man has spent a third of his life in prison, terribly mistreated, denied a fair and open trial, and now is likely to spend yet another eight years behind bars. But this still isn't enough Dr. Welner.
For shame, Dr. Welner. For shame.
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