Disappointments, big and small

I experienced a couple of small disappointments last night. Here I'd been seeing Google's subject header all day, a compilation of telescoping letters proclaiming that it was the 400th anniversary of Galileo's invention. Only then I found out, maybe that wasn't exactly so. Still, when I got home from a movie (about extraterrestrials, at that), there was the bright star of Jupiter riding the sky.

Last summer we'd actually had a telescope here on loan, so had been able to look closely at the giant planet and even to observe several of it moons. Silly me, I thought maybe binoculars would work, but even when I propped them against the letterbox as a sort of tripod, I couldn't hold them still enough to see more than a bouncing blur of light.

But my big disappointment is ongoing still today.

The Canadian government continues to reject the idea that Omar Khadr should be returned home to Canadian soil, even though he remains the only citizen of a Western country to remain in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. Australia and Great Britain removed their detainees years ago, but Canada continues to dig in its heels and has currently decided to challenge yet another court directive demanding that our government bring him home. 

Their next (and final, I would assume) step in challenging such directives is having the case heard in the Supreme Court of Canada, a step that of course will be paid for by all of us.

I have no idea whether Khadr is guilty or innocent. But for that matter, no does anyone else. Even though he's been held for seven years -- and in a prison that doesn't meet Geneva Convention standards -- he has never been taken to trial. If this isn't cruel and unusual, I don't know what is.

For all of our country's platitudes about decrying human rights violations in China, and complaining about so many African countries' abuse of children as soldiers, it seems awfully contradictory for Steve Harper and his Conservatives to forget the fact that Khadr was brought to Guantanamo when he was only fifteen. If that doesn't qualify him as being a child soldier, what does?

Oh yes, just one more disappointment. As a concerned citizen, this is a matter I wrote about to my local (Conservative) Member of Parliament. Like so many of his party colleagues, he's great at playing up his dedicated religious beliefs. Among the things I asked him was: Wasn't Christ's message one of love and compassion? Naturally, I haven't received a reply.

A bad day for Canada

In fact, a day of shame.

The freshly released video of CSIS interrogating the then-16-year-old Omar Khadr in Guantanamo raises more questions about Canada's complicity in allowing a Canadian -- and an underage one at that -- to spend so many years in an unsanctioned prison.

As if the release of that video wasn't enough cause for shame, today was also the day Canada deported Robin Long, one of the 200 or so American soldiers who have come to Canada because they disagree with Bush's war on Iraq.

The most fitting comment on these events seems to be a section from Keith Maillard's "The Intervention of the Duke" (a piece from his book, Dementia Americana, Ronsdale Press, 1994 which also appears in Crossing Lines, an anthology from Seraphim Editions, 2008). The brilliant leader referred to in the poem is none other than Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a Canadian prime minister who was unafraid to stand up on behalf of Canada and the country's code of honour.

-22-

He doesn't look half bad twenty years later --
the only statesman in the western world
who would allow himself to be photographed
upside down above a trampoline. He said no
you may not inquire of any young man arriving at the border
as to his status in the armed forces
of the United States of America.
We thought Canada meant peace.
My eyes filled with tears when I crossed
into Quebec and saw the Maple Leaf flying.
As soon as I could, I became a citizen.
For all my jokes about maple syrup, I was proud.
Now it makes me sick to see my country play the yapping cur,
chasing the tail of the American dog gone barking into war.
- -

O, Stephen Harper, if only you could take a page from the annals of your predecessor. What a great country we might once again be.