Christie Blatchford is one of the few mainstream media commenters who doesn't think of Omar Khadr as some kind of benign victim, if not hero:
...
what Edney is doing is unorthodox and arguably even a risky mixing of
the professional with the personal. While your lawyer is your best friend and sometimes your only one when
you’re in trouble, he doesn’t usually move you into his house.
... I wonder if any lawyer who has so devoted himself to a client, can see him or her clearly.
... Edney also [accused the prime minister of being a mean, anti-Muslim bigot]. This was one of those examples of a defence lawyer imagining he has the
exclusive patent on principled conduct, which is ridiculous. ... it’s loathsome to ascribe the worst of motives – racism – to the prime minister.
Omar Khadr has spent his entire adult life immersed in radical Islam and jihad. It stretches credulity to the extreme to believe that he has all of a sudden transformed his thinking and his allegiances. No doubt al-Qaeda and Khadr view Dennis Edney and Khadr's media cheerleaders as some of their most useful idiots.
His lawyer's comments were over the top, but I don't have a problem with any lawyer defending Omar Khadr as under our justice system no matter how horrid the crime, everyone is entitled to a strong robust defence. That is done as we rightly believe it is better to let a guilty person go free than convict an innocent person.
ReplyDeleteAs for Omar Khadr; listening to him speak he sounded quite reasonable so I guess only time will tell but I think the decision to release or not release should be based on a psychiatric assessment as to what risk he posed. Our justice system is not based on vengeance, it's based on public safety whereby we only keep people behind bars as long as they are a danger to the public. Considering the cost of incarceration I think a fiscal conservative attitude would be to not adopt the Tories tough on crime which hasn't worked and instead go back to the old sentencing which worked fine as Canada still had a very low crime rate.