Good for the Canadians

The Canadian government has decided to pay Can$ 10 million to Omar Khadr.

To recapitulate the story, he was taken to Afghanistan by his father as a 15 year old, and then threw a grenade in a firefight that killed a US soldier.

He was taken into custody, tortured repeatedly, and eventually pled guilty, he was later repatriated to Canada, and then released on bail in 2014.

Khadr filed suit against the Canadian government for depriving him of his rights, and illegally treating as an adult while in detention, and now Canada has settled with him, paying him Can$10 million settlement:

Canada's Liberal government will apologize to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr and pay him around C$10 million ($7.7 million) in compensation, two sources close to the matter said on Tuesday, prompting opposition protests.

A Canadian citizen, Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at age 15 after a firefight with U.S. soldiers. He pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. Army medic and became the youngest inmate held at the military prison in Cuba.

Khadr later recanted and his lawyers said he had been grossly mistreated. In 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Canada breached his rights by sending intelligence agents to interrogate him and sharing the results with the United States.

The case proved divisive: defenders called Khadr a child soldier while the then-Conservative government dismissed calls to seek leniency, noting he had pleaded guilty to a serious crime.

The US took a child soldier and treated him as a criminal, they then tortured him abd coerced a confession out of him with the active support of the Canadian state security apparatus, a fact that Canada's judiciary has repeatedly taken a dim view of.

This is a good thing, though I am not surprised that former PM Stephen Harper had to exit the scene for the right thing to be done.  Harper was to doing the right thing as Josef Stalin was to rule of law.

It's nice that the Canadian government is doing the right thing.

It will never happen here, since Obama decided to normalize this behavior, (Looking forward, not backward) and then systematically promoted the people who aided and abetted crimes against humanity in the US state security apparatus.

There will never be an accounting for the torturers, much like there will never be an accounting for the banksters who blew up the world in 2008.