Article content continued

My faith has been a very big part of my survival and I've had a lot of good people around me. So I don't want to take any credit for that

On whether or not he was a ‘child soldier’

Asked whether religious extremists had put him through training exercises while he was in Afghanistan, Khadr said they did. But he hesitated to adopt the “child soldier” label.

“Saying that I was a child soldier would assume that it was a regular war and I was in a regular army,” he said. “I think I was just at an unfortunate place with an unfortunate circumstances, that you know, I was with adults, they told me to do something and I did it. So I don’t know if I would call myself — that’s the term people use to try to describe my situation.”

On what he experienced at Guantanamo Bay

Khadr described how an interrogator told him he was lucky he’d been shot in the firefight, otherwise some of the interrogation techniques could have been worse. Another talk show guest, filmmaker Monia Chakri, asked whether he had experienced solitary confinement. By the Canadian definition of solitary, whereby you can hear or see people but cannot have physical contact with them, the longest stretch was “I think two and a half years at a time,” he said.

Khadr reiterated what he has said time and again in court and in interviews: his guilty plea had come because he saw no other choice. “Unfortunately, in court, in regular court you don’t have to do that but in Guantanamo you have to lose to win. Almost everybody who has been released through the military commission has admitted guilt. So your chance of being released is to admit guilt, and then, you know, come back and fight it in a proper court,” he said. “I don’t regret my decision. I had to do it because I knew I was faced by a process that was set up to fail you.”