National Shame

On July 27th, 2002 a fifteen year old child was wounded and taken prisoner by American forces in the village of Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan. During the firefight that preceded his capture, Khadr was shot twice in the back causing gaping wounds in his chest that would still require treatment 10 months later.

For the next few months he was held at Bargram Airbase, the site where much of the known harsh interrogation, or torture took place. It was there that the worst torture the 15, then 16 year old Khadr faced in detention was carried out. But it didn't end there. In October of 2002 Khadr was transferred from Bagram to Gitmo where he has languished for 8 long years. He is now the last detainee at Gitmo with a Western passport, and the only detainee captured on the battlefield to be tried for murder.

The mere fact that Canada is the last country to remove its citizens from the torture and abuse prone facility that is Gitmo is shameful enough, but that this detainee was a child soldier at the time of his alleged offense makes this a truly unforgivable dereliction of Canada's duty, and responsibility to its citizens. It is generally understood in the international community that child soldiers, even if they commit heinous acts, are themselves victims and should not be prosecuted as though they are adults.

In a decent society, the reason for punishing people who have committed offenses is that they had a choice and they chose to violate the law. But what choice did a teenage Omar Khadr have? His father took him to Afghanistan as a child. Once there, what were his options? He had none.

No...there is no justification for his treatment first by his father by bringing him into the world of Islamic extremism, then by his American captors for torturing him and denying him proper treatment as a child soldier, and finally by the Canadian government who could have requested he be repatriated as every other Western nation has done for their citizens in American detention.

After 8 long years in detention, Omar Khadr may well be a hardened Muslim extremist today, but if he is, then he is one of America's making. When he was first apprehended, at the age of 15, he was a child thrust onto a battlefield not of his making and should have been rehabilitated, not tortured.

Pro-Life...unless that life differs politcally

I've been wanting to write about the death of Doctor George Tiller for some time now, and I've probably missed the boat as far as saying something that hasn't already been said given how fast our news cycles move these days, but I still feel it is important for as many voices as possible to denounce this heinous killing of, as Jeremy Scahill said on Real Time with Bill Maher, "a provider of women's health care." Despite having always been of the belief that women must have the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy without any pre-conditions or constraints, it was really upon reading John Irving's The Cider House Rules that cemented that belief that for this country to truly be considered free, women need to have full control of their own bodies and there need to be doctors able to perform these operations in modern, safe, and hygenic environments.

The fallacy of the pro-life movement is that even if abortion is banned outright throughout the 50 states, that does not mean that abortion will end as a practice. What will happen instead, is that abortion will be pushed underground and performed by people without the training, or the professional conduct of today's ob-gyns who perform these procedures. Anyone who claims to care about life should be appalled at the possibility of America's return to the days of back-alley abortion clinics and other horrors of our oh so glorious past.

As has been reported by any journalist worth their paycheck (of which there are fewer and fewer every day) no providers of women's health care are taking women who are 9 months pregnant and giving them a late-term abortion. In the United States less than 2% of all abortions were conducted after the 21st week of gestation, and an estimated figure from 1997 suggests that less than 1% were done after the 27th week. For those bothering to listen to the doctors who perform these abortions, it becomes clear that these are done not because the patient suddenly feels like taking a trip to Europe and doesn't want a baby along, but are done because of some very serious health problems with the fetus or a potential danger to the mother.

The "right-to-life" movement has been sickeningly been pretending to denounce the death of Dr. Tiller while in the same breath excusing it because of his willingness to perform abortions. This deceptive double-speak is mostly to blame for the crazies like Scott Roeder who actually go out and commit these atrocities. And while I believe that we need the inalienable rights of free speech in this country, I think it is false, and disingenuous for those spewing the most hateful and uncompromising vitriol to pretend that the death Dr. Tiller, and the terror it spreads among women seeking abortions or doctors providing health care to women, isn't exactly what they want to see happen.

While I disagree with many of the terror statutes being used to hold prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, or any of the other black sites the CIA has, Mr. Roeder is the textbook definition of a terrorist and should be shipped out to one of those facilities. In his Falwell/Robertson/Limbaugh/O'Reilly motivated killing of Dr. Tiller, he has killed more Americans than many of the detainees in Gitmo over did and he has terrorized more people than Omar Khadr, the last remaining westerner still held at Camp X-ray.

Americans need to stop being fooled by monikers. Focus on the Family and the American Family Association don't give a shit about families. The Patriot Act isn't patriotic. Pro-lifers do not care about life or they would work harder at making things better for the lives that are already here on this earth rather than focusing all of their energies on the lives that do not yet exist.

Close Guantanamo...Yesterday!

Now that the spineless democrats have joined with their colleagues across the aisle in opposing the immediate closure of Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay, it is time for us all to snap out of this political theatrical event and realize that we must close it, and we must close it now. I decided to do my best to sum up some of the arguments against closing Gitmo immediately, coupled with my counter-arguments.

1. They're terrorists!

* Unfortunately for the proponents of this argument, and more unfortunately for many of the captives themselves, they are not all terrorists. For those of you who, unforgivably don't follow the news, there was a messy period during and after the invasion of Afghanistan when the American military was offering cash money for Al Queda or Taliban members (just like Ed McMahon does for gold). Given the extreme poverty found across much of Afghanistan, the presence of corruption, and the disinterest the American military had for fact checking, dozens, if not hundreds of people were literally sold to the invading army and labeled as terrorists. While a good number of them have since been released (some after spending over 6 years in detention without any charges) some of the remaining 250 could well fall into this category. As recently as May 2008, a journalist was finally released after being held since December of 2001. That's right, it took 6 and a half years for the American military to realize that he was not a terrorist.

2. I don't want them in my state!

* Look, let's be reasonable. The men at Gitmo are people who had AK-47s in some patch of scrub land in Afghanistan. That's what got them classified as terrorists, or, "the worst of the worst." They are not super villains with laser beams that shoot from their eyes, or possess super human strength to bend the bars of a pitiful American prison. They are no more likely to escape from an American prison than was Timothy McVeigh or Ted Kaczynski (the unibomber for those of you living in the United States of Amnesia). This fabricated notion that by putting them in American prisons, they'll somehow manage to escape and immediately blow up your precious Wal-Mart is laughable at best, and sad at its worst.

3. Well, maybe they weren't terrorists then but they are now.

* This is by far the most offensive argument made to continue to hold people at camp X-ray. The argument is essentially that we, through our over-zealous policies, have created brand spankin' new terrorists by torturing them and solidifying their hatred of the West, and specifically America. This is where we get to set an example to the future administrations that this will not be tolerated. We have had to eat so many piles of steamy, smelly shit from the previous administrations actions and it is time to say ENOUGH. We cannot continue to cement the position that even though you are warned not to do something due to the possible ramifications, and you do it anyway, that we must then absolve you of the responsibility of ownership of that mess. I believe the old adage must apply to these situations, from the invasion of Iraq to the clustf@#k that has become the detainee situation, and that is "you break it? You buy it." Instead of continuing to hold these people who were not Al Queda or Taliban or any other "terrorist" group member until the day when they will certainly want to seek revenge, we should work with programs like those of the Saudis and try to rehabilitate these young men. If successful, they would become extremely powerful voices on America's behalf in the Islamic world.

60 Minutes - When did you lose your spine?

I just watched a feature on 60 Minutes about Saudi Arabia's approach to dealing with inmates released from Guantanamo.  While it showed some of the progress being made by the Saudis' attempts to rehabilitate the former Gitmo detainees, the underlying tone of the piece was very hostile and David Martin's questioning seems to completely ignore the fact that many of the detainees that have been guests of Gitmo were sold the Americans by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan with no actual links to terrorism or the Taliban.  Those people were then held in terrible conditions and subjected to torture and other intensive interrogation that would undoubtedly make an inmate harbor angry feelings towards his former captors.  The fact that our detention policies have created angry young men is not a blank check to then throw away the key and we should be doing our best to encourage similar programs to those of the Saudi government's so that these young men can be released and rehabilitated as soon as possible.  The longer we keep them in Guantanamo and abuse them, the more likely they will in fact become terrorists when released.