Don't blame Khadr. He was a fifteen year old kid who thought he was fighting infidel invaders. Which he was, from a Muslim perspective.
When in 1913 fifteen year old kids from Halifax or Toronto lied about their age, joined the army, and went on to kill people, we celebrated them, and we celebrate them to this day.
One of the many pie-in-the-sky feel-good initiatives that various Canadian governments have championed over the past couple of decades has been the cause of "child soldiers." Obviously that was only intended to apply to the primitives on the Dark Continent, otherwise the opinion makers and the political do-gooders wouldn't have lost their zeal so quickly when a Canadian kid got caught on the wrong side of their good intentions.
Anyway, the financial settlement wasn't a reward for what he did or did not do as a 15 year old. It was compensation for our government's conniving in his illegal torture and detention in the years that followed, an ordeal that contravened both Canadian and international law.
As for those outraged over the settlement who compare the outcome of this case to the paltry compensation given our dead and maimed veterans, they're missing the point. They put on those CF uniforms to protect our values, foremost among which is the rule of law. This is what happens when our government tramples those values.
We should be grateful that our government can still be held accountable.
The fact that Khadr now joins the ranks of Arar, Almaki, El-Maati, and Nureddin in the Muslim Millionaires Club isn't Khadr's fault.
You'd hope the boffins in Ottawa are smart enough to detect a pattern here and make an effort to mend their ways.
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