LogFAQs > #903156876

Zikten posted...

why does reintegration need to include giving them free money? in america we don't give money to reformed criminals.

Well, as both I and the mod were alluding to, what xjay is describing and what actually happened are two wildly disparate things.

The individual in question is Omar Khadr, a Canadian-born citizen who was captured in Iraq 15-ish years ago during a raid where an American medic named Chris Speer was killed by a grenade. Khadr was accused of throwing the grenade and was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he underwent torture at the hands of the Americans, torture that the Canadian government, under three successive administrations, was aware of (and, on at least one occasion, bore witness to). He eventually confessed to killing Speer and pled guilty to Murder in Violation of the Laws of War in return for a plea agreement that saw him released from Gitmo and returned to Canada to serve out an eight year prison sentence.

This is the story you'll hear from people like xjay. Unfortunately, it also conveniently omits a few rather pertinent facts:
-Khadr consistently denied that he threw the grenade that killed Speer and only confessed after being subjected to years of torture. He was badly injured in the raid and maintained that he did not remember the battle where he was captured. Once he was repatriated to Canada, he immediately recanted his confession and insisted that his original testimony - that he cannot recall what happened - was accurate.
-Khadr was only identified as the man who threw the grenade at Speer based on the testimony of two witnesses from Speer's squadron. Both of them have since recanted their testimony and now say they do not know who threw the grenade that ultimately took Speer's life.
-Khadr's conviction did not come from a court of law, but from a widely-discredited military tribunal.
-The charge that Khadr was convicted of - Murder in Violation of the Laws of War - did not exist when Khadr was captured. It was passed into law by the Bush administration in 2006, four years after the supposed offence occurred.
-Khadr was just 15 when the attack took place, making him a child soldier (notably, the only one ever captured, prosecuted, and tortured by the United States since the Geneva Convention outlawed such treatment).

Based on a combination of the above facts, Canadian courts - despite being fought every step of the way by the then-Conservative Government of Canada - ruled that Khadr's rights had been violated and allowed him to be released from prison on parole (despite the fact his original conviction precluded that possibility). He is currently fighting to have the original conviction vacated (understandable, given that it is based on a slipshod case and a confession obtained via torture, for a crime that didn't exist when it was committed by a person who, by international law that both Canada and the US are signatories to, is ineligible for prosecution in the first place).

He also sued the government of Canada for their role in his torture. The Trudeau government, having been elected over the Harper conservatives, were advised by their legal team that they had no realistic chance of winning the case (the Supreme Court had already issued a ruling confirming that Khadr's rights had been violated) and, thus, they opted for a settlement instead of making the taxpayers pay for the trial and a judgement that would almost inevitably have been higher than the settled amount.

So yeah... that's a pretty far cry from "We welcome terrorists and give them free money."
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Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!