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The Khadr Thread

Remius said:
My Grandfather was shot down over Italy. 

My uncle was shot down over France. ( KIA )

Depends on who they came in contact with before being handed over to the Luftwaffe.

In France, where the great majority of people were friendly, help was never far away, but a fallen airman had to find it before he was found by the enemy.

"Quite apart from the day-to-day heroism of the average bomber crew, was the wonderful assistance given by the average French family to the airmen. For the French, it was all or nothing."
Massacre over the Marne by Oliver Clutton-Brock.

"The married man or woman caught harbouring an Allied airman brought reprisals on the whole family - even small children were put to death. This was the price for patriotism, and as the Gestapo held most of the cards, the odds were strongly in their favour."
Rendez-vous 127 by ACM Sir Basil Embry.

The Last Raid by Dan Ford details the interrogation techniques used on American B-29 crews whose misfortune it was to be shot down over Japan.



 
Thanks for sharing that.  Pretty mild to how I feel but it's good to see that not everyone is out to hug a thug like some "gentle souls".
 
http://cherylgallant.com/omar/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Omar+Khadr&utm_content=Omar+Khadr+CID_1f353b1810598b11783b3cba7c3cce34&utm_source=MP+Host+Email+marketing+software&utm_term=STOP+PAYMENT+HERE
 
$13M would have bought them their lives........instead they had their heads brutally hacked off....yet we can pay that POS...........

http://globalnews.ca/video/2235457/canadians-john-ridsdel-and-robert-hall-kidnapped-in-the-philippines
 
Breacher said:


Quoting one person throughout seems like idolizing, and isn't very convincing; if the author wanted to make the case that "[p]eople’s anger over the Khadr deal isn’t a partisan thing" and that "[p]lenty of people who vote Liberal are upset too," it would have done her well to quote more non-partisans than just Charles Alder (N.B.: the point is the author needed variety--there's nothing wrong with Mr. Adler).
 
Someone is upset.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Khadr lawyer upset by settlement reports
Laura Payton, Ottawa News Bureau Online Producer
Published Wednesday, July 5, 2017 3:53PM EDT
Last Updated Wednesday, July 5, 2017 4:22PM EDT

OTTAWA -- A lawyer for Omar Khadr says he's upset and disappointed somebody went public with the details of their mediation with the federal government.

John Phillips wouldn't confirm any of the details of the mediation talks or the details of the reported $10.5 million settlement offer, but said it wasn't anyone from Khadr's team who spoke to the media about it.

"I'm upset," he said in a brief interview with CTV's Kevin Gallagher.

"It's inappropriate that the information was leaked to the press."

Khadr is suing the federal government for $20 million following his nearly 10-year detention in Guantanamo Bay. He first launched the suit in 2004. Publicly available records show Khadr's team and federal government lawyers met in Ottawa a few weeks ago for mediation.

"I'm disappointed that any discussions about the mediation process regarding Mr. Khadr have been discussed outside of a confidential setting," Phillips said.

Khadr was convicted of several terror offences in an American military court after pleading guilty to throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer during a firefight in Afghanistan. He was 15 at the time.

Advocates say Khadr was a child soldier and should have been treated as one.

The military court sentenced him to eight years plus time served. He was eventually transferred into Canadian custody and is out on bail pending an appeal of his guilty verdict. Khadr says his confession was made under duress.

The Supreme Court of Canada found Canadian government officials complicit in Khadr's mistreatment in Guantanamo.

Speer's widow won a U.S. court ruling against Khadr, awarding her US $134.2 million in 2015.

She's since filed an application for an injunction so any money awarded to Khadr will go to her and Sgt. Layne Morris, who was blinded by the same grenade. She's also asking the court to make the U.S. court's award enforceable in Canada.

Phillips wouldn't comment on the application for an injunction.

Don Winder, a lawyer for Tabitha Speer, declined to comment on the application or the reported settlement.

More on LINK.

Sorry.  I am offended that you are upset that there may have been a "whistle blower" who leaked this information.  It is all about Government Transparency after all; is it not? 
 
E. B. Korcz Forrester said:
Quoting one person throughout seems like idolizing, and isn't very convincing; if the author wanted to make the case that "[p]eople’s anger over the Khadr deal isn’t a partisan thing" and that "[p]lenty of people who vote Liberal are upset too," it would have done her well to quote more non-partisans than just Charles Alder (N.B.: the point is the author needed variety--there's nothing wrong with Mr. Adler).

It's an opinion piece. It's about Charles Adler's opinion. I'm not sure how quoting numerous others would add to the piece. Of course, that's just my opinion.
 
Can I LOL this?

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

Conservatives must move on from demonizing Omar Khadr
Konrad Yakabuski

The Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Jul. 05, 2017 2:42PM EDT
Last updated Wednesday, Jul. 05, 2017 8:15PM EDT

It was under a Liberal government that Omar Khadr’s constitutional rights were summarily violated, but it was under a Conservative one that he was transformed into the one-man wedge issue that would ultimately sour Canadians on Stephen Harper’s sinister way of doing politics.

Have the Conservatives learned nothing? Relics of the Harper era persist in portraying Mr. Khadr as a “convicted terrorist” who “confessed” to egregious crimes that took the life of one U.S. solider in Afghanistan and permanently maimed another. They seek to stir up outrage at the Trudeau government’s decision to settle Mr. Khadr’s $20-million lawsuit against Ottawa for half that amount on the grounds that any wrongs committed against him have since been righted by Canadian courts.

“The fact that he is living in Canada at liberty should be compensation enough,” according to Conservative foreign affairs critic Peter Kent. “After all, he is a former enemy combatant.”

Stop it. Anyone with a whit of common sense, much less compassion, knows that the Canadian-born Mr. Khadr, captured at 15 in a raid on an al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan, should never have been labelled as such. And that it was only in the fog of war that followed the 2001 terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that such labelling was ever allowed to happen in the first place.

Then Liberal foreign affairs minister Bill Graham’s first instinct was to resist such a rush to judgment. On Mr. Khadr’s capture, his department issued a statement deeming it “an unfortunate reality that juveniles are too often the victims in military actions and that many groups and countries actively recruit and use them in armed conflicts and in terrorist activities … Canada is working hard to eliminate these practices, but child soldiers still exist, in Afghanistan” and elsewhere.

News of Mr. Khadr’s capture, however, emerged within a few days of the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The public mood was not one of forgiveness, but one of resolve in seeking justice for 9/11 victims, and for the Canadian and American soldiers who had died in the subsequent war in Afghanistan. Mr. Khadr also happened to have been the son of a real Canada-hating al-Qaeda combatant, who had taken him as a child to Afghanistan. Then prime minister Jean Chrétien’s government soon caved in to public opinion and U.S. pressure, enabling Mr. Khadr’s interrogation at Guantanamo Bay in utter defiance of his constitutional rights.

Still, it was Mr. Harper, leader of the Canadian Alliance at the time of Mr. Khadr’s capture, who picked up this soiled ball and ran with it. From 2002 and throughout his almost 10-year stint as prime minister, he milked the Khadr case for all its political worth, seeking to make an example of this youngster of notorious lineage and provide proof of his own tough-on-terrorism credentials.

The problem was, Mr. Khadr kept ruining the Conservative narrative by proving, time and again, that he was “better than the person [Mr. Harper] thinks I am.” In 2008, Mr. Harper’s own government’s officials deemed Mr. Khadr “salvageable, non-radicalized and a good kid.” Yet, even as evidence mounted that the treatment of prisoners at Gitmo and other tough-on-terror tactics actually did far more to encourage the radicalization of young Muslims than deter it, Mr. Harper and his ministers never let up in their demonization of Mr. Khadr. They even suggested Mr. Khadr could be stripped of his Canadian citizenship under Harper-era legislation that the Trudeau government recently repealed. Right up until its defeat in 2015, the Harper government sought to overturn the easing of Mr. Khadr’s bail conditions while he awaits the outcome of his appeal of his conviction before the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, even though the entire planet knows that conviction was bogus and could only have been arrived at under the Wonderland-like legal distortions of the U.S. military commissions set up to try Mr. Khadr and other Gitmo detainees.

If the panicky aftermath of 9/11 helps explain the context for the trampling of Mr. Khadr’s rights, there is no explanation for the Harper government’s relentless exploitation of the Khadr case for political gain. By 2015, the diminishing returns of that political strategy were evident. Canadians had grown weary of Mr. Harper’s Manichean world view.

If the Conservatives ever want to again be worthy of government, they should congratulate Mr. Trudeau for closing the Khadr chapter on the cheap, let Mr. Khadr get on with his life and wish him luck.

More on LINK.

"DEMONIZE". 

Point that everyone is overlooking is that a person under the age of 16, can be TRIED AS AN ADULT under certain circumstances.
15 year old (now 19) Winnipeg teen charged just this year for 2013 murder.
 
E. B. Korcz Forrester said:
...
Edit: Just take it from Jim Smyth’s (for those who don't recall the name, he's the OPP interrogator who lawfully and masterfully extracted a confession from former Col. Russell Williams in 2010) performance that all you need to get a confession is preparation, behavioral profiling and wit. Hahaha. I don't understand the need for "enhanced techniques" that transcend the boundary of what is lawful. [/font]

One doesn't have to look at a Canadian, Smyth--who I agree is an excellent interrogator--to look at how wrong the CIA-inspired interrogation system was.

The FBI was initially involved in many of the pre and immediately post 9/11 terrorist interrogations and had much success. One agent in particular--Ali Soufan--had much success by techniques as simple as putting a carpet on the floor of the room and sitting on it while having chai and cookies with the subject. He was highly critical of the CIA-inspired techniques.

Here's one of the many articles about him:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-fbi-official-ali-soufan-condemns-guantanamo-torture-a-1014475.html

:cheers:
 
Larry Strong said:
$13M would have bought them their lives........instead they had their heads brutally hacked off....yet we can pay that POS...........

http://globalnews.ca/video/2235457/canadians-john-ridsdel-and-robert-hall-kidnapped-in-the-philippines
But then there's the whole "paying ransom to terrorists" thing there ...

In case anyone's interested, here's a link to the Supreme Court decision that led to this - also attached if the link doesn't work for you.
 

Attachments

jollyjacktar said:
But we AREgoing to be paying ransom to a terrorist.  ;)  and hugs and kisses........ 

According to a source, we DID pay a terrorist on Wednesday, now for the hugs and kisses.....    Not that I was likely to, but this deal seals my vow to never vote Liberal.

Omar Khadr receives $10.5M from Ottawa, sources say

Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner also expected to receive apology for wrongful imprisonment, abuse

CBC News  Posted: Jul 06, 2017 10:50 PM ET| Last Updated: Jul 07, 2017 12:25 AM ET

Former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr has received his $10.5-million settlement from the federal government, sources tell CBC News.

The sources said the payment was made Wednesday night.

The Canadian Press reported late Thursday that a source familiar with the situation says the Liberal government wanted to get ahead of an attempt by two Americans to enforce a massive U.S. court award against Khadr in Canadian court.

Word of the quiet money transfer came on the eve of a hearing in which a lawyer planned to ask the Ontario Superior Court to block the payout to Khadr, who currently lives in Edmonton on bail.

Toronto lawyer David Winer is acting for the widow of a U.S. special forces soldier, Chris Speer, who Khadr is alleged to have killed after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, and another U.S. soldier, Layne Morris, who was blinded in one eye in the battle.

Tabitha Speer and Morris won a $134-million dollar US default judgment against Khadr in a Utah court two years ago, but legal experts have said getting any money Khadr might receive in order to satisfy the Utah judgment would be extremely unlikely to succeed.

It was not immediately clear whether the hearing scheduled for Friday morning would go ahead given the payout.

'Oppressive' interrogation'

The government and Khadr's lawyers negotiated the deal last month, according to The Associated Press. A government source told CBC News earlier this week that Ottawa will also apologize for his treatment.

The Toronto-born Khadr confessed to killing Speer in Afghanistan when he was 15, under interrogation that was later deemed "oppressive."


He had been seeking $20 million in a wrongful imprisonment civil suit against Ottawa.

International attention

The Canadian was taken first to prison at the Bagram U.S. military base in Afghanistan and then to the prison at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba and ultimately charged with war crimes by a military commission

After pleading not guilty to five war crimes charges, including murder, in 2010, he changed his plea to guilty later that year and was sentenced to eight years plus the time he had already spent in custody.
■OPINION | Omar Khadr deserves his settlement and his apology from the Canadian government: Jonathan Kay

He returned to Canada two years later to serve the remainder of his sentence and was released in May 2015 pending an appeal of his war crime convictions, in which he argued that his admissions of guilt were made under duress.

Khadr spent 10 years in Guantanamo Bay. His case received international attention, with some advocating that he should be treated as a child soldier, not an adult.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2010 that Canadian intelligence officials obtained evidence from Khadr under "oppressive circumstances," such as sleep deprivation, during interrogations at Guantanamo Bay in 2003, and then shared that evidence with U.S. officials.

With files from The Canadian Press
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/omar-khadr-settlement-1.4194142
 
It's interesting how Trudeau is ok with paying $10M to Khadr of the Taliban but refused to pay Abu Sayyaf $6M for Robert Hall and John Ridsdel.  At the time of the Hall - Ridsdel kidnapping, Trudeau stated that Canada does not pay ransoms to terrorists.  I guess some terrorists are better than others, or he has changed his mind. 
 
Sprinting Thistle said:
It's interesting how Trudeau is ok with paying $10M to Khadr of the Taliban AQ but refused to pay Abu Sayyaf $6M for Robert Hall and John Ridsdel.  At the time of the Hall - Ridsdel kidnapping, Trudeau stated that Canada does not pay ransoms to terrorists.  I guess some terrorists are better than others, or he has changed his mind
As I'm suggesting that bit in orange is also happening here when this sort of thing is mentioned ...
Larry Strong said:
$13M would have bought them their lives........instead they had their heads brutally hacked off....yet we can pay that POS...........

http://globalnews.ca/video/2235457/canadians-john-ridsdel-and-robert-hall-kidnapped-in-the-philippines
jollyjacktar said:
According to a source, we DID pay a terrorist on Wednesday, now for the hugs and kisses.....
What I mean is that nobody who's suggesting or supporting the comparison here seemed to be advocating paying ransom to bring Canadians home any time during the discussion of the Phillippines fracas on these means - mostly partisan "what are they doing about it?".  And there's not a ton of support for paying ransom on this thread about a Canadian kidnapped by bad guys.  And I don't see a lot of support in this thread for paying the Taliban to release the Canadians who are "guests" in Afghanistan.  So suggesting, "we should have paid ransom to folks we consider terrorists instead of paying this guy we consider a terrorist" doesn't seem entirely internally consistent, does it?  Or is it just me?  ;D
jollyjacktar said:
... Not that I was likely to, but this deal seals my vow to never vote Liberal.
Based on the Fowler open source info, even if Canada didn't pay a ransom, the Gov't of the Day (Team Blue) didn't appear to discourage payments from someone to help get Fowler rescued, so I guess NDP's all that's left for ya (unless you're in QC) ;D
 
FJAG said:
One doesn't have to look at a Canadian, Smyth--who I agree is an excellent interrogator--to look at how wrong the CIA-inspired interrogation system was.

The FBI was initially involved in many of the pre and immediately post 9/11 terrorist interrogations and had much success. One agent in particular--Ali Soufan--had much success by techniques as simple as putting a carpet on the floor of the room and sitting on it while having chai and cookies with the subject. He was highly critical of the CIA-inspired techniques.

Here's one of the many articles about him:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/former-fbi-official-ali-soufan-condemns-guantanamo-torture-a-1014475.html

:cheers:


I once watched an interview with Mr. Soufan, and read a few things about him, but I've never heard that. Interesting.
Thank you for sharing that.
 
milnews.ca said:
Based on the Fowler open source info, even if Canada didn't pay a ransom, the Gov't of the Day (Team Blue) didn't appear to discourage payments from someone to help get Fowler rescued, so I guess NDP's all that's left for ya (unless you're in QC) ;D

Ah, not necessarily.  I was able to vote for the independent candidate in my home riding last election.  This way I was able to give the finger to all three big brands and still exercise my civic duty as a citizen.
 
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