Omar Khadr: The Agony and the Shame

In most of my posts about Omar Khadr I called him the Guantanamo Kid.

To remind people that whatever he might or might not have done,....or how people feel about him or his crazy family...... he was just a horribly wounded Canadian child soldier who never should have been abandoned by his country.

Now a new book called Guantanamo's Child is out....and it reveals that his American guards had another name for Khadr....Buckshot Bob... because of all the shrapnel in his body.

And that he wasn't just tortured at Guantanamo. He was also tortured in the secret prison at the big U.S. base in Bagram.

Read it and weep......or vomit.

Approximately one month before Ramadan in 2003, two different men came to visit me. They told me that they were Canadian. One of the men was in his 20s and the other in his 30s. These two men yelled at me and accused me of not telling the truth. One of the Canadian men stated, "The U.S. and Canada are like an elephant and an ant sleeping in the same bed," and that there was nothing the Canadian government could do against the power of the U.S.

And then there's what they did to him at Guantanamo as detailed in this book.














One evening in March 2003, Omar was taken from his cell and in no mood to co-operate. The guards left him in the interrogation booth for hours, short-shackled with his ankles and wrists bound together and secured to a bolt on the floor. Unable to move, he eventually urinated and was left in a pool of urine on the floor.

When the MPs returned and found the soiled teenager, Omar's lawyers later said, the guards poured pine oil cleaner on his chest and the floor. Keeping him short-shackled, the guards used Omar as a human mop to clean up the mess. Omar was returned to his cell and for two days the guards refused to give him fresh clothes.

When they weren't threatening to rape him.

Even though he was just a child.

One day, Yee stopped outside Omar's cell. Two things surprised him as he bent down to talk to the teenager.

Omar could speak perfect English, which was uncommon in the blocks. He was also reading a book that had pictures of Mickey Mouse, Goofy and Donald Duck that Yee knew wasn't one the library stocked. Omar told Yee the book was a gift from one of his interrogators. He expected Omar to be insulted but instead he appeared delighted.

When Yee came again to the teenager's cell later that day, Omar was curled up asleep on his steel cot clutching the Disney book to his chest.

Which explains why the last time his legal team went to visit him all he asked for was a colouring book.

And makes the fact that he was abandoned by his country even more disgusting.

When will Stephen Harper start acting like a Canadian Prime Minister. Instead of a Pentagon STOOGE?

When will Canada act like a real country?

How long must the shame go on?