Archive for November, 2011

This week, Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner, was supposed to leave Guantánamo after nine years and three months in US custody.

No one thought that Khadr would return to Canada as a free man, as he has another seven years to serve in a Canadian jail as part of a plea deal he made at Guantánamo a year ago, but it was reasonable to expect that he would be transferred to Canadian custody this week, as the plea deal was for an eight-year sentence — with one year to be served in Guantánamo, followed by seven in Canada.

However, as Canada.com explained last Friday, “It could be as many as 18 months before Omar Khadr steps foot in Canada even though he becomes eligible for transfer from Guantánamo Bay on Monday” (October 31).

Throughout this entire story, the behavior of the United States government, first under President Bush, and then under President Obama, has been disgraceful. Khadr was abused, and was never rehabilitated according to the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which stipulates that juvenile prisoners — those under 18 at the time their alleged crime takes place — “require special protection,” and obliges its signatories to promote “the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict.” Read the rest of this entry »

The events of the last few days — in and around St. Paul’s, where the Church of England and the Corporation of the City of London have been working out how to deal with the “Occupy London” campaigners in their midst — have been genuinely extraordinary. First, Giles Fraser, the Canon Chancellor of St. Paul’s, resigned, stating openly that he feared that violence would be used to evict the camp, which was something that he could not countenance, and then a chaplain, Fraser Dyer, also resigned.

The alarming presumption was that, obliged to choose between God and Mammon — or, more seriously, between the business of the City of London, and the demands of the protestors engaged in a novel form of political dissent and asking serious questions about whether the profiteering, tax evasion and unaccountability of banks and corporations is acceptable — St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the hierarchy of the Church of England, had chosen to endorse its establishment role. And this, of course, involved the Church ignoring its roots in the teaching of Christ, who spoke regularly about the poor, and also criticised those who conducted financial transactions in the house of God, as described in the Gospel of St. Matthew, where it is stated that Jesus “went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers.” Read the rest of this entry »

For the 171 prisoners remaining in Guantánamo, a burning question — when, if ever, will any of them ever leave? — has apparently become unanswerable. The Obama administration failed to act swiftly and decisively enough during President Obama’s first year in office, and, ever since, lawmakers in Congress have repeatedly passed legislation to prevent prisoners being released. Their release has also been prevented in the courts by right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, who have, as I have repeatedly explained, gutted habeas corpus of all meaning.

This situation has been complicated by the fact that, under President Obama, the Justice Department has continued to deal with habeas corpus claims as though the Bush administration was still in office, and has not cross-referenced its cases with the findings of the President’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, a sober collection of career officials, lawyers and representatives of the intelligence services, who concluded, after a year-long review of the prisoners’ cases, that only 36 of those still held should be tried, and that 89 should be released.

Add to that the President’s systematic aversion to confrontation on “national security” issues, and it becomes more comprehensible why we have reached a situation whereby the only prisoners to have left Guantánamo in the last nine months left in coffins, and why only three living prisoners have been released in the last 15 months. Read the rest of this entry »