I never thought I'd find myself more reactionary than Michael Ignatieff, but this really rubbed me the wrong way. 'Home?' 'Reintegrated?' Khadr's family was never integrated into Canadian society in the first place -- they lived in Pakistan precisely because that possibility horrified them. Now Guantanamo is a moral abomination, and we should do whatever we can to help Obama out in closing it. But Omar Khadr shouldn't be our problem in any special way. That is, if we took citizenship seriously and had sane requirements for it*, the Khadrs would never have been eligible, or at least would have had it revoked decades ago. You'd especially think that a Conservative government, if it took government seriously (but apparently conservatism now precludes that), would care about that having Canadian citizenship mean something. But no. Presumably the imposition of any new standards would be perceived as picking fights with the hyphenated voters they're desperate to woo, so instead they just let citizenship itself come to be devalued to the point of worthlessness -- we didn't even get our citizens out of the Gaza Strip! Which is disgusting and clearly racist at bottom -- the assumption can only have been that Palestinian-Canadians aren't the real thing. (Same thing with Lebanon not so long ago.) But so long as you make citizenship easy to get and impossible to lose, there are going to be lots of cases in which going to bat for your citizens isn't unquestionably the right thing to do, as it always should be.
* Like what? Well, maybe you should have to swear an oath to the effect that you don't hate and mean to actively work to destroy everything Canada stands for, with citizenship revoked if you turn out to have lied about that (as I believe is already the case for lying about war crimes). That doesn't seem too much to ask, does it? (And yes, I realize that oath would be a tricky thing to write.)
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As slimy as the Khadr family is, holding more passports than I've had hot dinners, there's still a case to be made for repatriating Omar Khadr. He was underage at the time of his arrest and the evidence against him was a) circumstantial and b) partially faked - two reasons why he should be tried in a justice system that's more reliable than Guantanamo's; and Canada is the only option. If Brenda Martin, who was actually convicted of an actual crime in an actual legal system, can come home, surely Khadr can too.
Well, circumstantial and partially faked is par for the course at Gitmo, no? And I don't really see what the point of an attempt at a real trial would be. I think all those guys should just be freed, period, get it over with. It's exceedingly unlikely that any of them have done anything that merits more punishment than they've already received, and there's really no practicable way to find out -- all the evidence is going to be tainted by now, and there wasn't much of it to begin with.
Anyway if Khadr needs a place to go, I reluctantly admit we have an obligation to take him. But only because of our own prior negligence on the citizenship front.
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