Down With Racist “War on Terror”!

Freedom for Omar Khadr!

On August 10, an American military commission began the sham “terror” trial of Omar Khadr at the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In 2002, Khadr, then just 15 years old, was shot in the back and captured by U.S. troops at a battle near Khost, Afghanistan. The gravely wounded youth was hauled off to the notorious Bagram prison where he was interrogated and tortured—threatened with rape, held in stress positions and suffocated until he blacked out. For the last eight years he has been entombed in a Guantánamo cage, where he has suffered more physical and mental abuse.

Khadr is charged with “murdering” a U.S. soldier. He also faces a series of other charges including conspiracy, support to terrorism, attempted murder and spying. But his only real crime in the eyes of the imperialist butchers is that he managed to survive the firefight during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Both the current Harper Tory government and the previous Liberal regimes have been complicit in the detention and torture of Khadr, the only Canadian citizen held at Guantánamo. In 2003 the Liberals made a secret deal with the U.S. to have CSIS security agents interrogate Khadr and pass on information to his U.S. jailers. Several Canadian courts have ruled that his rights were violated, including through the interrogations by CSIS and foreign affairs officials. Ignoring these rulings, the Harper government has consistently refused to seek Khadr’s repatriation.

The U.S. government passed the Military Commission Act in 2006 to circumvent rights accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention, so that “coerced testimony” and torture would be admissible. Indeed, the mountain of evidence that Khadr was tortured into “confessing” has already been thrown out by the judge. By being deemed an “unlawful combatant,” in the highly unlikely event of an acquittal Khadr could still be locked up indefinitely.

Earlier in the summer, the prosecution offered a bogus “plea bargain” in which he would admit guilt in exchange for release from Guantánamo in five years, with the remainder of a 30-year jail sentence to be served in Canada. Khadr refused, condemning the military commission as a “sham process” and stating: “I will not willingly let the U.S. government use me to fulfill its goal.”

Had Khadr in fact carried out the killing of the U.S. soldier, this would constitute an act of legitimate defense against the invading imperialist troops. But the prosecution’s case is in any event based on lies and cover-ups. In April, the senior U.S. Special Forces officer in charge of the Khost assault revealed that he had changed his report of the events after the fact. Photo evidence indicates that Khadr was not responsible for throwing the grenade that killed the soldier. In 2008 the Pentagon accidentally released the eyewitness account of the soldier who shot Khadr, which affirmed that another fighter against the U.S. invasion was still alive when the soldier was killed. This contradicts the prosecution’s claim that Khadr must have thrown the grenade because he was the only one still alive. Khadr’s former U.S. military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, aptly noted that “the U.S. government had a problem on its hands when it found that it had a 15-year-old Canadian on its hands with two gaping bullet holes in his back that had been facing away from the fight.” We demand the immediate release of Omar Khadr and all the Guantánamo detainees!

U.S. president Obama claimed he would clean up some of the “excesses” of the Bush-era “war on terror” by ending the military tribunals and closing the Guantánamo prison. Of course he has done neither. But he did make good on his promise to ratchet up the occupation of Afghanistan, launching the biggest military operation there since the 2001 invasion.

From the start, we opposed the invasion of Afghanistan by U.S., Canadian and other troops. We stood for its military defense against imperialist attack without giving any political support to the reactionary Taliban cutthroats. We call, as we have from the outset, for class struggle at home against the capitalist rulers. Every victory for the imperialists in their military adventures encourages more predatory wars, while every setback serves to assist the struggles of working people and the oppressed around the world. All Canadian, U.S. and NATO troops out of Afghanistan now!

For Class Struggle Against Anti-“Terror” Hysteria!

The “war on terror”—with its torture, frame-ups, secret trials and indefinite detention—is a political construct of the ruling class used to create a climate of fear and intimidation. Its purpose is to further regiment society and abrogate democratic rights. The rulers have used it as an all-purpose justification for neocolonial occupations abroad and repression at home.

Canadian troops have been full participants in the occupation of Afghanistan from the start. They kill and maim civilians while handing over prisoners for torture or execution. The “revelation” last year by senior Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin that torture was “standard operating procedure” in Afghanistan embarrassed the Harper government. But as we noted after the initial accounts of torture emerged several years ago: “Prisoner abuse in Afghanistan is as intrinsic to the global imperialist ‘war on terror’ as the torture by U.S. troops in Iraq and the demonizing and repression of Muslims in the U.S., Canada and other Western countries” (“Torture and the ‘War on Terror’,” SC No. 153, Summer 2007).

The recent hue and cry by the opposition parties over the detainee abuse was sheer hypocrisy. It was a Liberal government, backed by the NDP, that originally sent the troops to Afghanistan, and all the parties supported the bloody role of Canadian troops up until 2006. The opposition is now calling for an inquiry into the abuse scandal, a sop intended to refurbish Canadian imperialism’s sham “humanitarian” credentials.

Successive governments have passed ever more draconian “anti-terror” legislation, starting with the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001, whose provisions are so sweeping as to encompass almost anyone whose political views run afoul of the ruling class. At the same time, the decades-old “security certificate” law—under which non-citizens have been detained indefinitely on the basis of secret “information” to which neither the detainees nor their lawyers have access—has been used to intern several Muslim men based on the flimsiest of suspicions. When the Supreme Court deemed the law unconstitutional, the Harper regime merely enacted a new one with virtually all of the earlier provisions intact.

In the first instance, the “war on terror” targets immigrants and ethnic/religious minorities, especially Muslims. But its ultimate aim is to go after opponents of the capitalist status quo, and particularly the workers movement. Leftist organizations such as the Communist Party of the Philippines, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Colombian FARC have been made illegal under Canadian “anti-terrorism” legislation. The banning of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam under the same law is now being invoked to fuel racist hysteria against some 500 Tamil refugees who made it to the shores of British Columbia (see “Asylum for All Tamil Refugees!”, page 3).

What the ruling class can get away with in its repressive drive depends on the level of social struggle. What is urgently needed is the independent mobilization of the working class, with its tremendous potential social power, to beat back the “war on terror” attacks. As part of our defense of Omar Khadr and all the targets of the government’s repressive hysteria, we seek to bring to the fore the Marxist understanding that the capitalist state cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers and the oppressed. The trappings of “democracy” under capitalism are a mask to obscure the naked class interests of the ruling class. Only proletarian revolution can sweep away the repressive machinery of the bourgeois state, a perspective that requires the building of a multiethnic revolutionary party that champions the rights and causes of all the oppressed. Free Omar Khadr! U.S. out of Guantánamo!