Heard this story on NPR last night. It seems there is a family in Canada with such strong known ties to al Qaeda that they are known in Canada as the
"al Qaeda family"
This is the real thing, an actual al Qaeda operative. The US would love to have Abdullah Khadr extradited, probably because all our vaunted anti-terrorist measures, all our suspensions of civil rights, all our hold-without-trial policies, haven't turned up any actual terrorists yet.
Unfortunately for Ashcroft et al, Canadians
don't want to extradite him. Why? Because they don't think he'd get a fair trial.
Now what in our conduct could have led them to believe that the US, that much-vaunted nation of law, wouldn't abide by the rule of law? It wouldn't have anything to do with keeping younger brother Omar Omar incommunicado in Guantanamo without trial for three years, would it? We have this thing called "due process", where everybody is entitled to a fair trial. We would never abandon that, would we?
Dictatorships have secret wiretaps against their own citizens, but we're a democracy, we have laws that protect our citizens from that kind of thing, and we respect them, right?
We are losing the all-important cooperation of other countries in the fight against terrorism, because nobody trusts the US to act like a nation of law anymore. That is what these goons have cost us.
Feeling safer yet?