Omar Khadr's plight reminds me of a conclusion I've drawn over the many years I've spent working with and teaching at-risk kids in both the elementary and secondary panels. If Omar Khadr were an animal, he'd be an Atlantic Cod. This might be a strange comparison, but please bear with me, I think it becomes clear at the end!
When at-risk kids (educationally or involved with Children's Aid) are babies and younger than 12, they're cute like baby Harp Seals. And just like baby seals, people love them, foster parents are easier to find, and everyone will generally go out of their way to help them. Yes sometimes there are egregious errors and failings by the child welfare-educational supports. Yes there are some horrendous kids that seem to be channeling pure-Satan, but for most, the cuteness remains and generally under 13 at-risk kids are easier to like and thus, easier to support.
But when these at-risk kids become teens, guess what? They aren't cute anymore. By 14, at-risk teens have often experienced a lot of traumatic events. They swear, they fight, are tremendously difficult to guide and discipline, smoke, sometimes have questionable personal hygiene, drink and do drugs, and have an almost psychic ability to find and exploit any adult's weaknesses. They are as big as adults, physically strong, and quick to lash out at everyone - especially those who care about them the most. Thus as the result of a thousand stereotypes and hackneyed cliches, people generally have a negative bias toward them. This means that rather than being comparable to baby seals, at-risk teens are more like...perhaps Atlantic Cod: far less photogenic, harder to gain the public's emotional support or indeed to get the public to care about, but every bit as at-risk and as important to protect.
So how has Mr. Khadr become a cod (and at this point I won't try to keep this horrific metaphor going - your welcome)? Well, he was captured wounded, at age 15, after a firefight in Afghanistan. At 15 he wasn't cute, he was packing an AK, and he may or may not have killed the American Sergeant Speer. Yet Kahdr's complicity in that's irrelevant because he was at the time a child soldier, and therefore not responsible because he had been coerced into being there in the first place. The only reason this Canadian teen was there in the first place was that his father - the true villain of the piece - forced him to be there.
No, Khadr wasn't a "terrorist", nor was he an "enemy combatant". He was the textbook legal definition of a "child solder". Far from criminal charges (to quote the movie 'Apocalypse Now's Captain Willard; "charging someone with murder [in a combat zone] is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500") and the unconstitutional kangaroo court he was subjected to made "Breaker Morant" look like the epitome of justice. In addition, the 13 years of illegal detention in an unconstitutional prison that violated all his rights under American, Canadian, and international law, rather than all of that he should have been treated as an abuse victim and helped to recover. It was the legal and moral responsibility of Canada and the US under international law to help him. But no: we'd all drank from the same cup of crazy-flavoured Kool-Aid that as been the ideology of the War of Terror (TM) offered to the West by America's PNAC megalomaniacs since 2001. As a Canadian veteran and holder of a Queen's Commission, I remain thoroughly ashamed of, and disgusted by my government's complicity in this debacle.
Finally, it doesn't matter if Khadr was as cute as a little baby seal or as slimy as a Cod. It doesn't matter if you love Khadr or hate him. It doesn't matter if he's a good guy or a complete jerk. What matters is that he was a Canadian kid - no different from mine or possibly yours, who after being betrayed by his father, was again betrayed by the government and nation that was both legally and morally bound to ensure his safety. A 15 y/o kid was ocher de by his father into a completely insane situation where he was badly wounded, needed and deserved help, and we in Canada failed him.