Just a kid
Footage of Omar Khadr weeping and calling out for Mommy has been circulating around, renewing charges that Guantanamo is a torture camp. Yet a soldier who encountered Omar Khadr in different circumstances says that he deserves what he has been getting. “Khadr ‘earned’ Guantanamo stay, says soldier,” by Stewart Bell for the National Post, July 15 (thanks to all who sent this in):
A retired U.S. soldier who was ambushed by armed fighters holed up in the mud compound where Omar Khadr was captured said on Tuesday the Canadian deserves to be at Guantanamo Bay.
Sergeant Layne Morris said he had not seen the dramatic interrogation video released by Mr. Khadr’s lawyers, in which the young detainee cries for help, but he brushed off the footage as a public relations exercise.
Sgt. Morris said the defence lawyers’ strategy seemed to be to win sympathy for their client, and that he found it “troublesome” the public had to be constantly reminded of what Mr. Khadr is alleged to have done six years ago.
Indeed.
“My lasting image of Omar is of him crouched in the rubble waiting for U.S. troops to get close enough so he could take one of them out, and he did that successfully and that is the underlying reason why we’re all here in the first place,” Sgt. Morris said.
“Omar is not a kid that was just snatched up off the street somewhere and has been wrongly charged and judged unfairly. I think he is precisely where he needs to be. He’s earned that stay.”…