Imagine if on 9/12 George Bush sent the FBI after Bin Laden and leveraged the world's considerable sympathy and good will towards the USA to apprehend the murderers using legal means.

However, the Bush administration chose to look at 9/11 as an opportunity to arrogate constitutional war powers to itself. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died needlessly and we got a dirty war that turned western democracies into surveillance states in the service of oligarchs and corporations.

Western governments — including the Liberal government — are still using terror to consolidate state power over citizens. This controversy in Canada over the Khadr award is just more blowback.

Harper was more interested in using Khadr as a wedge issue to consolidate power than in upholding the law of the land. And now, predictably, we have citizens and an opposition party that consciously chooses to privilege its animus and thinly veiled chauvinism over the rule of law.