Guantanamo inmate stirs debate in Canada

TORONTO — Omar Khadr, 20, is an unlikely poster boy for international justice.

When he was 15, the Canadian landed in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo after allegedly killing an Army medic during fighting in Afghanistan.

His family has been dubbed "the First Family of Terrorism" in Canada: They lived in Osama bin Laden's Afghan compound, and his father reportedly helped channel money to Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network. Almost every family member has either been killed, wounded, imprisoned or investigated because of suspected terrorist connections.

But for human rights groups, Khadr has become a symbol of what they call the flaws of the U.S. military justice system and Canada's conciliation.

This month, U.S. military commission judges dropped all charges against Khadr, ruling that military tribunals were for "unlawful enemy combatants" and that he, like all other suspects in Guantanamo, was classified only as an "enemy combatant."

The Pentagon says it will appeal the decision, and State Department legal advisor John Bellinger said the U.S. believed international law allows it to hold suspects until the end of the conflict in question, even if they are acquitted.

"That means, innocent or not, he may never get out of there," said Khadr's lawyer, Dennis Edney. "If it were your child, your heart would break."

Critics say that the case's dismissal calls into question the whole legal basis of the tribunals and that Canada should bring Khadr home to be tried. But Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Mackay said the government would wait until "the appeal process has been exhausted" before calling for Khadr's release.

Now the case of the boy who has come of age in legal limbo has fueled a debate in Canada about whether the government is putting relations with the United States over its willingness to protect its citizens' rights. The question has evolved from "Is Omar Khadr a terrorist?" to "Why are his rights not worth standing up for?"

"We have raised concerns about Khadr's case for four years, but this trial highlights how flawed, ad hoc and broken this whole process is," said Alex Neve, the secretary-general of Amnesty International in Canada. Neve recently released an open letter calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to intervene, as other countries have. Britain, France and Germany were successful with demands that their citizens and permanent residents be returned to stand trial, and an Australian detainee, David Hicks, was sent home to serve his sentence.