U.S. army medic who saved Khadr's life calls $10.5M settlement the 'smart path'
He'll never get the image out of his head.
In 2002, Donnie Bumanglag was a U.S. medic in Afghanistan. In the aftermath of a firefight, he saw a 15-year-old boy lying on a piece of wood. The boy was covered in rubble and had two bullet wounds in his chest.
That boy was Omar Khadr
Fast forward to this month, when Khadr was awarded $10.5 million and an official apology from Canadian government.
The settlement has been a divisive issue across the country. But Bumanglag spoke with
As It Happens guest host Helen Mann about why story shouldn't be so black and white.
Here is part of their conversation:
I've been following this story from far, just because I was involved in it in a sense. For me, I feel like it was 15 years. You know, that's a long time. People change. A lot of things change. I'm not the same person I was 15 years ago, by any stretch of the imagination.
When he was passed over to me they told me that he was essentially a terrorist and he looked essentially like a child. I mean, it's the same person. I had to deal with it the way that my body perceived it and that was a child who is possibly a threat to me.
You were ordered to do your best to keep him alive, as I understand it. I'm just wondering, you'd also been told that he'd thrown a grenade that had killed Sgt. Christopher Speer and seriously wounded another Delta soldier. Were you, at the time, conflicted about keeping him alive?
I wasn't told personally who he had killed. I still don't know what the truth is, I think it lies somewhere in between. But I knew that it was a medic and Omar was a source of information that I was supposed to keep alive.
There was a lot of commotion going on between me and my team and getting him back onto the aircraft. It was very apparent that most people were uncomfortable taking off his flex cuffs.
You've indicated already that you saw him at the time as a kid. How much blame do you ascribe to his actions at the time?
I have a kid that's older than Omar now. I would never think to take him to the mountains, to a militia group and leave him there and expect that this isn't going to be the end result.
So I don't know. I'm not his family. I'm not his father. But I don't think he totally was given a fair shot. You've got to put yourself in those shoes. None of us know what we would have done.
Obviously, the Supreme Court made a decision that they felt that those rights were impinged or not upheld. Just the settlement alone is probably the smart path for Canadian taxpayers.
I know that there are a lot of things being said, that he is a terrorist, he's this or that. Like I said, I don't know where the truth lies. I'm a trained investigator. I understand forensics. I understand interrogation. The way that that stuff is being obtained would never be accepted by any other form of legal system in our country and it probably wouldn't be accepted by yours and so that's probably where things ended up the way they did.
Most of the people that I've seen that are out there on social media making opinions, you know, they don't have a say. They weren't there and if they would like to make those kind of decisions they should get themselves into the arena.
We were soldiers. His father took him to a place where he probably shouldn't have been. And somehow we all met on the other side of the world. And now we're here, picking up the pieces.
I mean, all of us are. I mean, this is war. I think that we should realize — together, all of us should realize — how ugly war is and really question why it is that we choose to do it.
Listen to our full interview with Donnie Bumanglag.
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