Omar Khadr set to Plead

Omar Khadr, a young man who was taken prisoner in Afghanistan while fighting NATO forces alongside the Taliban in 2002. He was 15 at the time; he captured while wounded, probably tortured, interrogated at length, intimidated and threatened with many things including rape and murder, and held for years without access to a lawyer. He was eventually given not a trial, but a tribunal, and is currently in the midst of his second military tribunal to determine his guilt or innocence.

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.

Blood, Lies, and Wikileaks

Unless you've been actively avoiding the topic, most Westerners should be aware of the existence of Wikileaks by now; this is the internet media organization that's been responsible for some really astonishing leaks of government and corporate documents and news (much of which related to government and corporate malfeasance). Some of it's been so impressive that they won the Amnesty International 2009 Media Award. Anyway, some time ago Wikileaks released 77,000 classified U.S. Military documents they'd managed to get ahold of. They had 92,000, but withheld 15,000 of them which they felt would put people at undue risk based on the contents and/or classifications attached to those documents.

The end result is a pretty bleak picture of what's going on over there.

Of course, shortly after the leak went live - which was done partnered with Der Spiegel, the New York Times, and the Guardian - the media narrative has become all about how Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, now has blood on his hands because the documents released included non-redacted names of informants.

I'll admit, this is regrettable. Wikileaks, to their credit, used the NYT as a go-between with the Department of Defence to get help in redacting sensitive names found in the documents, but the Department of Defence refused. Wikileaks is an organization with all of five employees - they didn't have the manpower to do it themselves. This meant they had a choice: go forward and get the information out there, or sit on it.

Some organizations would have sat on it, denying the public its right to know the sort of things being done in their name. That's not really how Wikileaks rolls, though, so they released the documents. Go to the Wikileaks.org website if you want to take a peek.

But that's all background - this is all old news. So, why am I talking about this now, rather than when it was all fresh?

Because this article at Newsweek, about a surge in death threats and violence in the wake of the Afganistan documents leak, is pissing me off. Allow me to explain why.

This narrative much of the media is running with is based on what is basically fabrication. That newsweek article? It's based entirely on a twisted version of this news feed, which points out that the tribal elder who was killed received no death threats, no one has claimed responsibility for his killing, and was never named in the Wikileaks documents anyway. In fact, to date no one has been able to point to a single death or act of violence directly attributable to the leak. It's all hypothetical, though you can bet that if it weren't there'd be somebody at the White House crowing about it as loud as they could.

If a surge in violence is occurring in Afganistan in the wake of the Wikileaks thing - which, based on the contents of the documents, is a very suspect idea since those documents suggest that the surge of violence has been growing for years - then it's simply based on the fact that the media reported that some people in Afganistan have been working with coalition forces as informants. Which means that it doesn't matter one whit if you redact the names - people are going to be targeted for being "suspected informants" anyway. (But then that's what's been happening all along, isn't it?) So this admonishment of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, when you wipe away all the crap, becomes less "You should have redacted the names" and more "You shouldn't let the public know about things!"



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These accusations sound stunningly familiar, in fact. It's the same sort of shpiel that's been thrown out since this whole War on (Some) Terror started. Stop me if you've heard these before:

Are you an anti-war protester? Then you're hurting the troops! You must love terrorists!

Are you questioning the bombing of Baghdad? Saddam gassed his own people! How can you support that monster!

You want torturers and people who imprison others without trial brought to task and made to answer for their actions? You must hate freedom!

You're shedding light on the failure of U.S./Coalition military policy, and the frequency with which civilians are murdered collateral damaged? You've got blood on your hands!

Classification of information is abused by governments as a matter of course, and really much of the modern media just sort of rolls over and plays dead for the powers-that-be. I'm honestly not sure if this wasn't always the case - I'd like to think there was once a time when official news outlets were on a noble quest for the truth, and certainly there seems to have been a time when they were more powerful than they are now, but I suspect that in truth this golden age of news agencies never truly existed. Still, the internet and the global society that it's helping facilitate, baby step by baby step, is a pretty powerful potential source for information, as Wikileaks is fast proving.

In order for the democratic process to work, the public needs to be able to inform itself of what's being done in its name. This goes not just for the U.S., but for every citizen of every coalition nation - a group that includes me. It's tremendously regrettable if anyone gets hurt as a result of this leak - and I'm glad that no one has yet. But civilians are being slaughtered like it's going out of style in Afganistan, and my government owns a part of the responsibility for those actions by virtue of taking an active role in this bout of military adventurism. This is all being done in my name.

That means I have a right to know what's really going on there. I have a need to know, so I can act as a responsible citizen. Wikileaks is not perfect, but it helps fulfil that need, and any accusations by Coalition government bodies of its founder having "blood on his hands" is, at best, disingenuous. It's classic beam vs. mote territory, really.