khadr

The former detainee filed a civil suit seeking $20 million after spending years at Guantanamo Bay.

Child soldier. Convicted terrorist. Khadr is about to return to Canada, but no one has been able to see his full seven-hour interview at Guantánamo Bay. Until now.

The NYT today has a great profile of William Kuebler, Omar Khadr’s lawyer.  It is fascinating both for what it tells us about Kuebler himself, but also about how the military commissions have been thwarted from within by lawyers within the armed services. Everyone expected the military commissions to  become kangaroo courts of trumped-up justice, but the exact opposite has occurred. The military lawyers have done such an effective job of challenging the  very system that has been set up that not a single trial has been held in seven years:

However scrappy he may appear, Commander Kuebler does not claim the typical lawyer’s zest for a fight for its own sake. Instead, he said, his faith and his work are intertwined. “It is a powerful way to be a witness for Christ,” he said, “by demonstrating your capacity to not judge the way everybody else is judging and to serve unconditionally.”

I know, I know – Colleague Wells has already liveblogged it, but just to give you a sense of our cuddly, forgiving Prime Minister:

Fresh from the Victoria break — or Honouring Our Monarch week, if you follow the regular Thursday now-I’m-sure-he’s-doing-it-at-least-partly-to-drive-me-crazy theme-ifying by Peter Van Loan — the kids — AKA our esteemed elected representatives – are back in Ottawa, the House is back in session and committees are back in business.

The Supreme Court of Canada will release its decision on this case next week:

UPDATE: I just noticed that the court is holding a pre-release lockup to brief journalists on the issues that arose during the case. While this is by no means unprecedented – according to my gmail archives, it’s been done on two earlier occasions this year – it does suggest that the court – or at least, its media relations specialists – expect that it may be a particularly newsworthy ruling.

32147 Minister of Justice et al v. Omar Ahmed Khadr

Monday, May 12, 2008

Last week, the Subcommittee on International Human Rights got a