The Omar Khadr case is a textbook example of how the federal Liberals, Canada’s self-described natural governing party, operate.

They do it by hypocritically changing their spots – if you don’t like Liberal principles, hang around for a few minutes, because they’ll have new ones – while blaming controversies on the Conservatives, for which Liberals were responsible.

A brief tour through the highlights of Liberal interactions with Khadr over the years illustrates the point.

It started in 1996 when then-Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien sought assurances from Pakistan’s prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, that Khadr’s father, Ahmed Said Khadr, would be treated fairly while Pakistan had him under arrest on suspicion of the terrorist bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.

Bhutto subsequently released Khadr, who returned briefly to Canada, then moved his family to Pakistan, where his sons, including Omar, began weapons training under the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

As it turned out, Khadr’s father, for whom Chretien naively went to bat, was a close associate of bin Laden, and in 2003 was killed in a firefight with Pakistani security forces.

The year before, Omar was involved in his own firefight with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, in which he was later convicted of hurling the grenade that killed army medic Sgt. First Class Christopher James Speer, and blinded Sgt. Layne Morris in one eye.

The Americans saved the wounded Khadr’s life, who, in 2002 was 15 years old – what the Liberals would later call a “child soldier” – and imprisoned him in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – which the Liberals would later describe as cruel and unusual punishment.

But at the time, the Jean Chretien and Paul Martin Liberal governments did nothing to help Khadr, other than making a perfunctory request that he not be sent to Guantanamo, which the Americans rejected.

In fact, the Liberals were only to happy to leave Khadr in Guantanamo – embarrassed as they were by Chretien’s intervention on his terrorist father’s behalf.

The Liberals later claimed – after losing power – that they regretted not doing more to help Khadr under their reign.

But in reality, while they were in power, they not only abandoned Khadr, they violated his constitutional rights.

In 2010, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled Khadr’s constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of the person were repeatedly violated by the Liberal government in 2003 and 2004.

This when the Liberals sent CSIS operatives and foreign affairs officials to interrogate Khadr in Guantanamo, subsequently sharing their information with Khadr’s American captors, knowing they had used sleep deprivation to break Khadr down.

It was only after Stephen Harper and the Conservatives defeated the Liberals in 2006, that the Liberals, now in opposition, demanded the Harper government intercede on Khadr’s behalf over his treatment by the Americans, and their own treatment of him in 2003 and 2004.

The irony, of course, is that the Harper government’s position on Khadr was essentially a continuation of the Liberals’ policy when they were in power.

That the Liberals are now attacking the Conservatives for criticizing the Trudeau government’s decision to give $10.5 million and an official apology to Khadr – for the wrongs done to him by the Liberal government in 2003 and 2004 – is the height of hypocrisy. It’s utterly shameless.

But that’s how Liberals roll.

lgoldstein@postmedia.com