I love hell I am hell

Former Guantanamo inmate Omar Khadr getting married

The 29-year-old has been out on bail in Edmonton since last year.

edmontonjournal.com

Postmedia News has confirmed the 29-year-old former child soldier will marry Edmonton human rights activist Muna Abougoush, a longtime supporter who wrote and visited Khadr in prison during his time in Canadian custody.

Facebook posts congratulating the couple quickly spread online.

“I am so happy to think you will be sharing your future together after so many years of shared past,” reads one message.

Abougoush is one of several women who started an international campaign for Khadr’s freedom. She helped launched a website to keep his story in the news and later began corresponding and visiting with him behind bars.

She told the Toronto Star in 2013 that she was nervous before their first meeting: “This case that everyone had been talking about for over a decade was about to become a real person.”

She told the same paper a few years later that Khadr was maintaining a positive outlook despite his challenges.

“Omar is very forward-looking, concentrating on his future. He doesn’t hold grudges. He knows if he hangs on to the negativity of the past he can’t move forward,” she said in May 2015.

Khadr was released on bail last May after spending more than a decade behind bars in both U.S. and Canadian custody, including eight years at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba.

Since then he has been living in the west Edmonton home of his lawyer, Dennis Edney, as he studies to become an emergency medical responder and reintegrates into Canadian life.

The U.S. military captured a badly wounded Khadr after a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002 when he was 15 years old. He was quickly sent to Guantanamo Bay where he was tried for war crimes by a military court.

Khadr eventually pleaded guilty in October 2010 to five war crimes, including the murder of a U.S. soldier, but later said he only entered the plea to escape the notorious prison, which has come under intense international scrutiny for its trial treatment of detainees.

He was given an eight-year sentence after his plea and was transferred to an Alberta prison in 2012 under an international treaty. He is appealing his U.S. war crimes convictions and was granted bail last year by the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, which ruled Khadr posed no threat to the community.

Since then his bail conditions have been relaxed further to allow Khadr to leave the house after midnight for employment or educational commitments.

Inside Gitmo: America's Shame

Fifteen years of pain and suffering outside the rule of law — why can't we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay?

www.rollingstone.com

“What’s important to understand about Guantanamo is not so much that it’s ‘outside the law,’ as laws and policies have been tailored to legitimize completely illegitimate practices, often after the fact,” says Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security and author of the upcoming Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, an account of the transformation of American justice after 9/11. “And to this day, the issues basic to American law – including fair and timely trials and a ban on abusive treatment in custody – have been supplanted by newer policies, buttressed by newer laws, which are politicized and subject to change. All of that turns Guantanamo into a living museum of what it means to break the law by rewriting it.”