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Payout to Khadr is unfair and even cruel

There is much wrong with the Khadr judgment and the subsequent payout.

To the editor,

Re: Editorial cartoon, July 11.

I believe your recent cartoon showing a government agent sending off a $10 million bonanza to Omar Khadr while casually flipping a coin to a disabled veteran is truly worthy of the old adage that a picture can be worth a thousand words. It illustrates, to a tee, the disgust many Canadians must feel at this evident injustice.

There is much wrong with that judgment and the subsequent payout. Khadr is a confessed murderer and to reward a confessed killer with this massive payout while the victim’s widow and family suffers is reprehensible. Next, the contrast between this horrendously generous reward and the miserly government pensions offered to both veterans and lifelong Canadian citizen-retirees is miserable to contemplate.

The courts may indeed say that proper procedures were not followed by government personnel and if this is so, there is a perfectly rational solution at hand and that is to confront and perhaps punish those government personnel for their errors.

But to proceed to give an admitted killer this kind of largesse at taxpayer expense is beyond idiotic. It is cruel in the extreme.

Leonard Melman, Nanoose Bay