Blame the conniving incompetence of Canadian officialdom for making Omar Khadr newest member of Muslim Millionaires Club

Don’t blame Khadr. He was a fifteen year old kid who thought he was fighting infidel invaders. Which he was, from a Muslim perspective.

One of many pie-in-the-sky feel-good initiatives that various governments have championed over the past couple of decades has been the cause of “child soldiers.” Obviously that was only intended to apply to the primitives on the Dark Continent, otherwise the opinion makers and the political do-gooders wouldn’t have lost their zeal so quickly when a Canadian kid got caught up in their good intentions.

Anyway, the financial settlement wasn’t a reward for what he did or not do as a 15 year old. It was compensation for our government’s conniving in his illegal torture and detention in the years that followed, an ordeal that contravened both Canadian and international law.

As for those outraged over the settlement who compare the outcome of this case to the paltry compensation given our dead and maimed veterans, they’re missing the point. They put on those CF uniforms to protect our values, foremost among which is the rule of law. This is what happens when our government tramples those values.

We should be grateful that governments can still be held accountable.

The fact that Khadr now joins the ranks of Arar, Almaki, El-Maati, and Nureddin isn’t Khadr’s fault.

You’d hope the boffins in Ottawa are smart enough to detect a pattern here and make an effort to mend their ways.