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It’s all true. Omar Khadr admits to being a murderer, a terrorist, a spy and an al-Qaida member. Monday, he confessed this to a U.S. war crimes court, also confessing he was motivated to kill Americans and Jews. Khadr murdered U.S. army medic Christopher Speer. Speer’s widow, Tabitha, sat in court Monday weeping, comforted by her sister. Her name almost never appears in the love letters to Khadr published in Canada as “news reports.” Khadr tried to kill Sgt. Layne Morris, too. He was blinded in one eye. Morris was also in court. I bet you haven’t heard his name...

NOTE The following text is a quote: IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 972-10 October 25, 2010 Detainee Pleads Guilty at Military Commission Hearing The Department of Defense announced that Omar Khadr pleaded guilty today in a military commission. In accordance with a pre-trial agreement, Khadr admitted, in open court, to committing murder in violation of the law of war, attempted murder in violation of the law of war, providing material support to terrorism, conspiracy, and spying. His sentence will be determined at a hearing that begins Oct. 26. Khadr admitted to throwing a grenade on July 27, 2002, that killed Sgt. 1st...

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - It took less than an hour inside a sombre military courtroom Monday for Canadian Omar Khadr to plead guilty to murdering an American soldier and end a war crimes case that has dragged on for eight years. The Toronto-born detainee told military judge Army Col. Patrick Parrish that he understood the charges, his confession, and the conditions of a plea agreement. In addition to pleading guilty to throwing a grenade when he was 15 that fatally wounded Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, Khadr is convicted of attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism.

MIAMI - A U.S. military judge has ruled there is no credible evidence that a Canadian prisoner on trial in Guantanamo on murder and terrorism conspiracy charges was tortured into confessing after his capture in Afghanistan. In a written ruling released by the Pentagon Friday, Army Colonel Patrick Parrish gave his arguments for rejecting a motion by lawyers of Omar Khadr requesting that confessions made by Khadr to U.S. interrogators should not used as evidence in his trial on grounds they were obtained through torture. A military tribunal trying Khadr opened proceedings last week at the Guantanamo Bay naval base...

Here's an op-ed that I wrote about Omar Khadr for the Sun newspapers. Instead of the junior high yearbook photo that most media use (it was provided to them by Khadr's mother -- seriously), here are a few photos I prefer for their accuracy and relevance: Needless to say, I've never seen these photos in the Canadian mainstream media. The first photo is Khadr sitting next to an AK-47 submachine gun (that is a fan in his hand). The other photo is Khadr assembling improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Both are screen grabs from the Sixty Minutes segment on Khadr, which...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — An anonymous woman testified Friday that, as a young Navy interrogator, she treated Canadian captive Omar Khadr with Fig Newtons and M&Ms — and that he came to sessions happily and confessed to throwing a grenade at U.S. forces in Afghanistan. "He smiled a lot and was always willing to talk," said the woman whom court officers identified as "Agent 11." Khadr, then 15, was captured, critically wounded, in a July 2002 firefight between U.S. troops and al-Qaida suspects in Khost, Afghanistan, during which a U.S. soldier died from grenade shrapnel wounds. He became...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - Plans to close Guantanamo are not sitting well with the Sept. 11 victims' relatives who sat stunned while two alleged terrorists declared they were proud of their role in the plot.

OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canadian courts grossly overreached when they ordered Ottawa to ask Washington to send a Canadian held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison back to Canada, a federal lawyer argued on Friday. The government wants the Supreme Court of Canada to overturn lower court decisions that it had to ask the Obama administration to repatriate Omar Khadr, accused of killing a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan. The court heard oral arguments on Friday, and Khadr's legal team asked it to give a speedy ruling. The case coincided with an announcement from U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder...

I see that Maher Arar, the huckster who lied his way into $10.5 million of our tax dollars, has had less luck with the U.S. legal system than he had with ours. A U.S. appeals court threw out his nuisance claim against the U.S. government. Now, that's not quite fair of me, is it? I mean, it's not fair to Canada's legal system because, had Arar actually gone to trial here, his case would have been thrown out, too. Arar's testimony would have been torn to shreds; he would have wilted under cross-examination. He would have been proved the liar...

OTTAWA — Despite losing a second court battle, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears unwilling to comply with a federal court order demanding his government seek the return of Omar Khadr to Canada. In a 2-1 ruling, the Federal Court of Appeal rejected Harper’s appeal to an earlier decision that demanded his government ask the U.S. to release Khadr from Guantanamo Bay. Describing the ruling as a “split decision” Harper hinted that he would be willing to take up the legal battle to avoid bringing Khadr home further. “The Department of Justice will be examining that decision and obviously I won’t...

The story began on March 20, 2009, when Ottawa police received a routine 911 call for a break-in at the house of Patrick J. Boyle, 51, a judge on Canada's tax court. The front door had been smashed, the house ransacked, and holes from .22-calibre bullets had smashed some windows. No one was home at the time of the break-in; the thieves apparently stole documents, a computer monitor, video games, and other personal items. Alarms went off, for the police were investigating the 2007 murder of a former colleague, Alban Garon, killed along with his wife and a neighbor. Then,...

WASHINGTON -- Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon on Tuesday provided assurances to the Obama administration Canada will not "interfere" in its review of terrorism charges against Canadian Omar Khadr, the last westerner remaining at Guantanamo. Meanwhile, a row has erupted between Mr. Khadr's military lawyer and the officer's boss -- resulting in the lawyer being barred from seeing the Canadian-born terror suspect as an inquiry unfolds. Mr. Cannon raised Mr. Khadr's case during a meeting in Washington with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seeking information about the U.S. decision to conduct a 120-day review of all Guantanamo detainees facing terrorism...

Steven Edwards, Canwest News Service U.S. NAVAL BASE GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - Accused terrorist Omar Khadr identified Maher Arar as someone he recognized who appeared at an al-Qaida-run "safe" house in Afghanistan, an FBI agent testified at a Guantanamo Bay military commission Monday. Robert Fuller said Khadr made the identification when he interrogated the Canadian-born terror suspect at Bagram in Afghanistan in October 2002.

A full week of pretrial hearings is set to begin at the US naval base here Monday as incoming US president Barack Obama prepares to shut down the controversial "war on terror" detention camp. A mental competence hearing is scheduled for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, alleged co-conspirator of the September 11, 2001 attacks. All five men charged with plotting the attacks are expected to appear at the hearing. In December, the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants said they would submit guilty pleas to terror charges pending mental competency evaluations. Judge Stephen Henley said the defendants also wanted...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A federal judge on Monday refused to block the military trial of a Canadian held at Guantanamo Bay and charged with killing a U.S. soldier while still a juvenile. Omar Khadr, of Toronto, was 15 when he allegedly killed Delta Force soldier Chris Speer of Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002. The son of an al-Qaida figure, Khadr was seriously wounded in the battle and has been held with the adult population at Guantanamo Bay since being transferred there in 2002. Khadr argued in pleadings in U.S. District Court that...

Canadian Security Intelligence Service - 2003 Interviews with Omar Khadr - Media Coverage Ottawa, July 21st, 2008 Information relating to interviews of Omar Khadr by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service CSIS and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) were recently released to Mr. Khadr’s legal counsel, following rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada in May 2008, and by the Federal Court of Canada in June 2008. Following the public release of this information by Mr. Khadr’s lawyers, there has been much national and international media coverage pertaining to these interviews. Much of this coverage has focussed...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

Nearly eight in 10 Canadians who saw Omar Khadr's interrogation video say it did not change their opinions of his case, according to a new poll. The survey, conducted by Ipsos Reid for the National Post, suggests 52% of Canadians have viewed clips of the seven-hour video since it was made public last week. Among those who have seen the footage, 78% said it had not altered their views on Mr. Khadr while just 22% said it did have an effect. The tape shows Mr. Khadr being questioned at the U. S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by Canadian...

David Addington and Omar Khadr are two names that will forever be linked to the war on terror.Mr. Addington is chief of staff to Vice President Richard Cheney and a former colleague of mine. He's the son of a West Point man who earned a bronze star in World War II and went on to become a general. Before coming to the White House, David put in stints at the CIA, at a congressional intelligence committee, and at the Pentagon -- all giving him an expertise on intelligence and national security issues only a handful of others can match. Then...

The leader of one of Canada's largest Islamic groups accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Monday of being indifferent to Omar Khadr's plight because he's "brown-skinned" and a Muslim. In an opinion piece released to the media, Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, wrote that Harper is "callously" unconcerned about the 21-year-old Khadr, who faces trial before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in October. "In this case, Mr. Harper is playing politics because of the backdrop of Islamophobia in this country," Elmasry said. "This is where a leader comes in, to say this is...