To the bitter end, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government seems determined to compound Canada’s shame in the Omar Khadr affair. The Americans were prepared to ship him home from Guantanamo Bay on April 13. He could have been back a month later. But Ottawa chose to take its sweet time, grudgingly repatriating him only on Saturday in one final shrug of indifference.

Most Canadians are repelled by the jihadist extremism that Khadr and his family embraced, and feel betrayed by them.

Even so, he is a Canadian citizen who was effectively abandoned by his own government in the near-hysteria that followed the 9/11 attacks. He was held and abused by American captors for a decade, most of it without trial. He was judged by a discredited military tribunal of vengeful enemies in what President Barack Obama once called a “legal black hole” that compromised core American values. And he was denied his rightful status as a child soldier under international law.

This case is an indictment not only of the Conservative government, but of its Liberal predecessors. Unlike other U.S. allies with detainees at Gitmo, Canada never forcefully objected to the abuse Khadr endured, lobbied for his return, criticized his lopsided prosecution or asked for leniency. No Canadian citizen should ever again be cut adrift as he was.

By now Khadr has spent 10 years behind bars for his wrongdoing. That’s years longer than he would have spent in prison here, had he been convicted in a credible Canadian court of first-degree murder as a young offender. Now that he is finally back on Canadian soil, the corrections service and parole board should work toward freeing him at the earliest safe opportunity, subject to a rehabilitation program that includes psychiatric care, monitoring and schooling. He has already done excessive time for his misdeeds.

While Public Safety Minister Vic Toews says he still has a “concern” that Khadr continues to pose a threat, any such concern can be addressed by supervision. It shouldn’t stand in the way of his release sooner rather than later.

Without minimizing his crimes, Khadr was never more than a marginal militant at best, pressed into service in anarchic Afghanistan at age 15 by an Al Qaeda-linked father who is now dead. The United Nations and rights groups regard him as a “child soldier” and a victim, not a hardened extremist.

Khadr’s crimes included throwing a grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. Christopher Speer during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. Two years ago Khadr pleaded guilty in a plea deal to murder in violation of the laws of war, a crime not recognized outside of Gitmo’s dubious military tribunals. The guilty plea was his only way of avoiding what Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada rightly called a “stunningly punitive” sentencing that could have kept him behind bars for life. He got eight years, with one to be served at Gitmo before he could return to Canada to serve the remainder here. In fact, he served two at Gitmo before his release on Saturday.

Rather than try to build a case that Khadr now needs to spend six more years behind bars, Canadian officials should come up with a plan to help Khadr rehabilitate himself, and ring down the curtain on this infamous spectacle.

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