Article content continued

One wonders how old he will have to grow before this business ceases, and the dire expectations that he will transform into an Islamic-terrorist phoenix are officially falsified. Will it be going on when the clever devil is 40? When he’s 50? There does not seem any possible doubt of it, however he conducts himself.

The intractable problem with Omar Khadr is simply his existence. The politicians who seem to crave (more of) his blood are, in an understandable way, trying to punish the behaviour of his father, and to retroactively abnegate the slack application of dual-citizenship principles that allowed Khadr Sr. to become Canadian while leading a double life as an international terrorist.

Omar Khadr is the manifestation of a curse upon the state. His personal activity and his ethical culpability are not really the point

No one who has read Sophocles or the Old Testament can fail to recognize the mentality at work here. Omar Khadr is the manifestation of a curse upon the state. His personal activity and his ethical culpability are not really the point.

Khadr’s friends have concentrated on defending him under the law: they are practically concerned with the paramount goal of obtaining his freedom. Lawyers, being lawyers, have all sort of points to make about the procedures under which he has been detained and abused. This is all appropriate and inevitable, but it tends to obscure the basic fact that no one knows for sure whether Khadr threw the most closely-studied grenade in military history — the one that killed U.S. Army medic Sgt. Christopher Speer.