punditman says...
Above is yet another great interview by Scott Horton, courtesy of antiwar.com. Download the mp3 here. (40:48)
Thus far, I have refrained from commenting on the Omar Khadr situation because, simply put, I can barely contain myself long enough to write about it.
As Andy Worthington points out, what is especially disturbing are the attitudes of a sizable number of Western citizens, who feel it is apparently okay to torture children just because they are deemed to be "terrorists" or "illegal foreign combatants" by an all powerful state. It is these crass souls--who feel obliged to actually sit down and gather their few remaining brain cells and bang out a hateful note--who worry me the most.
After all, it is one thing for this ilk to fire off a hateful harangue quite anonymously in a web forum, but quite another thing to attach their names to their embarrassingly misguided rants in the letters section of a national newspaper. Imagine trying to reason with these people over a few beers! I may have run into one or two over the past eight years, but shockingly, we now know that they can be found in ample supply. They either know nothing of the rule of evidence, international treaty obligations against torture, the rights of child soldiers--or they simply don't care. This can lead to only one conclusion: a sizable, grassroots, neo-fascist movement of dumbed-down creeps is lurking in the weeds.
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Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, discusses the recently released footage of Omar Khadr, the Canadian juvenile being held in Guantanamo, the dubious “charges” against him, the legal black hole of the made-up “enemy combatant” status, the evil and counterproductive nature of torture and the kangaroo court system in Guantanamo.
Andy Worthington is a historian based in London. He is the author of The Guantánamo Files, the first book to tell the stories of all the detainees in Guantanámo. He writes regularly on issues related to Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” on his Web site.
