Omar Khadr Finally Allowed to Phone Home From Gitmo

After being detained in Gitmo for 5 years, since the age of 15, Omar Khadr was finally allowed to phone his Canadian family for the first time.

"When we heard his voice, I was almost collapsing, and then he said 'Don't cry, hold on,' " Maha Elsamnah, the Khadr family matriarch, said in an interview yesterday.

She said that in the 50-minute phone conversation that was arranged by both governments on Tuesday morning her son told her he plans to boycott U.S. justice and quickly return to Canada.

That won't be happening any time soon, as we all know - thanks to the Canadian government which has dragged its feet and has refused to put pressure on the Bush administration to have Khadr sent back to Canada, unlike other countries' governments which have had Gitmo detainees returned.

The lawyer [Dennis Edney] said Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs arranged the telephone call with the Pentagon, which laid down conditions. The lawyer said he was not allowed to be present during the phone call, nor were members of the news media, and the U.S. military taped the call.

Why wasn't his lawyer able to monitor the call? What was the Penatgon afraid of?

Earlier this week, the US Supreme Court refused to grant a quick review of the US government's case against Khadr because there are other challenges to the law that detainees have no habeus corpus rights.

The court has twice ruled that foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba can pursue their cases in American courts, rejecting White House arguments that legal protections do not apply to foreigners outside U.S. territory, and that the Guantanamo prison is beyond the reach of U.S. civilian courts.

The latest Supreme Court appeal follows a federal Appeals Court ruling last month that limited detainees' legal rights.

The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a key provision of the Military Commissions Act, which U.S. President George W. Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a Defence Department system to prosecute terrorism suspects.

Detainees are now required to prove to three-officer military panels that they don't pose a terror threat.

Just how, exactly, are they supposed to prove that?

That's the legal hell the Bush administration and his Republican-led congress has wrought. Arlen Specter (R-PA) who expressed misgivings about the Military Commissions Act but voted for it anyway has proposed a bill titled the "Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007" but that's just one small step in dealing with hideous supression of detainee rights in the MCA (which Bush, of course, made more strict via the use of one of his infamous, dictatorial signing statements).

Regardless, justice for Omar Khadr under this legal regime won't be justice at all. Canada's government would do well to call for Mr Khadr to be returned home, but this Conservative-led bunch of Bush sychophants can't be expected to do anything that might ruffle any feathers.