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Great White North
Khadr the Younger admits training at al-Qaeda related camp
2003-12-02
And just think, he could be in NYC in a day with his passport ...
Abdul Rahman Khadr admits learning to use assault weapons at an ”al-Qaeda related” training camp but insisted that such instruction was routine for teens in war-torn Afghanistan.
"All the other terrorist leaders’ kids were doing it!"
"Just think of it as the Boy Scouts, only with turbans and automatic weapons..."
He said that the camp was run by Arabs and that some graduates went on to fight the Northern Alliance and others travelled to foreign wars in Bosnia and Chechnya. The camp was never visited by Osama bin Laden while he was there, he said, and political instruction was not part of the curriculum.
Just the whole Wahhabi/Salafist "kill infidels" and "worldwide theocracy" shticks, but those were all taught in religious classes, not political ones. Beyond that you could either go fight the Great Satan directly or join an affiliate group. As far as Binny never visiting, the man has an international terrorist network to run, for God’s sake, you think he stops by every five minutes for tea with the cannon fodder?
Mr. Khadr — a Canadian citizen captured in Afghanistan and held by U.S. authorities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than a year — denied Monday that negative conclusions should be drawn from his training at such a camp.
You’ll forgive me if I politely disagree with him on this one.
He called the time he spent training “a waste of my life” but stressed that it was perfectly normal for youths in Afghanistan to learn to handle weapons. ”Every kid, when he’s around 15, goes to train,” he said.
"Otherwise they end up hanging around the malt shoppe and racing their camels up and down the street while they holler at girlies."
A few minutes later, badgered by reporters during a press conference in Toronto, he lashed out in exasperation.
Guess the Canuck press is doing at least some homework these days ...
”In the beginning, who were [the camps] made by? Americans. Who were they made by? By the West. Because of the war against the Russians in the very beginning, against the communists. It was very normal thing, everybody was supportive of what was happening in the very beginning when it was against communists,” he said. ”... Lots of the people who trained at these camps, they were not al-Qaeda. They [wanted] to come and fight against the Northern Alliance.”
Or the Russians or the Indians or the Filippinos or the southern Sudanese or the Algerian junta or the Uzbek dictator, ect. It’s that whole Armed Struggle(TM) thing ...
Mr. Khadr, now 20, said that he had been handed over to the Americans by a Northern Alliance commander — who, he said, detained him solely because he was an Arab and might thus be connected to al-Qaeda. After more than one year in the U.S. penal colony in Cuba he was told he would be released.
"Herb, I don't think this mutt's got anything left to spill."
"Hokay, Bob. Toss him the hell out. Why waste money feeding him?"
”I said I want to go to Canada, they said: ’Well, the Canadians don’t want to take you, so we’re going to take you back to where we captured you.’ ” Flown to Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, with his ears and eyes covered, he was kept in complete isolation for the first 24 hours after his arrival. Only when his earphones and blindfold were removed, he said, did he realize that he was in Bagram, where he had been before. He said that the Americans handed him over to Afghan intelligence, who eventually released him.
One word: Why?
With no passport or money, he said he tapped old friends of his father, people who had access to power and influence.
Pakistani fundos like Qazi and Saeed or the good brass in VEVAK and the IRGC?
He borrowed enough money to be smuggled to Islamabad, where he was turned away by guards at the Canadian embassy, and then on to Istanbul, where he was similarly rejected. It was only in Sarajevo, after his plight had become public, that he was received by Canadian diplomatic officials.
Um, okay. That still doesn’t explain what you were doing in Iran ...
A reporter tried to suggest that, since it was the security guards and not the embassy officials who had spurned his pleas for help, the Canadian government could not be accused of forsaking him. That line of argument was blasted by Mr. Khadr’s lawyer, Rocco Galati. ”Those security guards are officials, they are the gatekeepers to our embassy,” he said, putting heavy emphasis on the word ’our’. ”I don’t like these nonsense, disingenuous distinctions between the persons at the door and the persons behind the door, if you can’t get behind the door it’s the same thing. Those security guards are Canadian officials.”
"I weep for you, the Walrus said... I deeply sympathize..."
Mr. Khadr would say very little about his time in Cuba, citing fears that going public about conditions there could jeopardize his younger brother, Omar, who is being held on suspicion of having killed a U.S. military medic. “I think that everybody has a right to be scared right now. Americans can catch you for no reason, put you away, not give you a lawyer, not give you anything,” he said.
I think we should be scared right now. Islamists will kill you for no reason. They won't give you a lawyer, either.
“My brother is in Cuba, he’s a juvenile, he’s been shot three times, he’s half blind, he has to go to the hospital every two weeks ... and I don’t see Canada doing anything about it.”
You’re breaking my heart here, kid ...
The younger Mr. Khadr, who turned 17 in September, is now believed to be the only Canadian remaining at Guantanamo Bay.
Can we keep him there?
Posted by:Dan Darling

#5  We're gonna have to make Lone Ranger the official Rantburg Mourner of Morons.
Posted by: Shipman   2003-12-2 3:23:39 PM  

#4  My favorite example of a fake quote circulated by the "peace" movement:

"Iraq is an imminent danger to the US." -- President G. W. Bush
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2003-12-2 9:59:09 AM  

#3  Yar! We be "campers!" So every 15 yr old goes to "camp" huh? I enjoyed archery, canoeing, and swimming myself, but damn! we didn't get AK-47 training! Shit - screwed again!

Does our poor mistreated lil jihadi have any skills at all? *snicker* Lone Ranger has this 'mechanic' pegged!

If Kanada had any sense or guts or understanding of their situation soon to be predicament, they'd deport him and his entire family back to Afghanistan, cancel the whole lot's passports. THEN they'd start searching their records for similar twits - which they will find by the boatload - a convenient lot size.

So how's that Friendship Fence coming along? Can we, uh, hurry it up a little?
Posted by: .com   2003-12-2 4:26:42 AM  

#2  Once again, I want to be the first one to request a moment of silence while I pop the cap off another bottle of beer in honor of the wounded warrior brother - OK, that's long enough burp. So - I wonder what this rabid dog gentleman, with his finely honed vocational skills let's see, you crimp the blasting cap around the det cord using your incisors, and then run the other end of the cord into the fuse lighter will be doing once he gets to Canada??? Maybe drywall carpentry???

Whatcha' all think?
Posted by: Lone Ranger   2003-12-2 1:40:32 AM  

#1  Abdul wants to know where the grown ups are. He needs help damn it.
Posted by: Lucky   2003-12-2 1:27:08 AM  

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