I have colleagues and friends, whose views I respect, on both sides of the Khadr issue -- he should be freed vs. he should rot. But try as I might, all I can come up with is indifference.

I don't wish him dead, but I don't want him free, either. All I know is that I don't want him here in Canada, unless he is in a prison cell. He is both a jihadi and a Canadian citizen. And while there must never be different classes of citizen, I suspect Khadr is more a jihadi than a Canadian, so my concern for his fate is weak.

I don't blame Khadr fully for how his life has turned out, but I don't absolve him of all personal blame, either. His father, an al-Qaeda jihadi fundraiser, and his mother, a terrorist sympathizer, are probably mostly at fault for who he has become. But Omar is himself now 23 and shows no remorse for his teenage participation in Islam's holy war on the West.

I am largely unmoved by his defenders' pleas for leniency because he was a "child soldier" when captured in Afghanistan in 2002. Some have likened him to the truckloads of children abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) operating in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. As my National Post editorial-board colleague Jonathan Kay has argued, "isolated from their families, and stripped of any sort of moral compass, these child brigades were renowned for such monstrous acts as hacking off the legs and arms of defenceless villagers." Still, after the war, these children were assimilated back into society and no one blamed them, so -- the logic goes -- we should do the same for Khadr.

But Khadr is no longer a child and gives no indication of wanting reincorporation into Canadian society. I'm not even sure reincorporation is the right term. For the last decade or more, Khadr has spent more time in Guantanamo Bay's detention facility, and before that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, than in Canada. From about the age of 10 or 11, he has known very little of Canada. And during his time incarcerated at the American base in Cuba, he has never once said that all he wants is to live quietly, in peace in Canada.

Among the writers here at the National Post, the one whose opinions I respect most is probably George Jonas. Elsewhere on this page, he disparages Khadr's murder confessions this week because of Khadr's eight years imprisonment under the Americans. "A prisoner in shackles may tell the truth," George admits, "but he cannot tell it freely." And because his confession is not freely given, it is worthless.

I am not deaf to this argument. Nor am I unmoved by the fact that many murderers convicted of their first killing in the West would not be sentenced to much more than the eight years Khadr has already spent behind bars, so even if he is guilty, he should be released with time served.

And I don't buy the American argument that he is an enemy combatant rather than soldier. He was an irregular soldier, but a soldier nonetheless, so his captors' claim that he can be detained indefinitely is thin, indeed.

I don't like the length of time it has taken to hear his case. I am not entirely comfortable with the manner of his interrogation nor the lopsided military justice system in which his case was to be tried.

Still, he has been treated better -- his faith and rights given more respect and he given more justice--than jihadis and other radical Islamists treat their victims, whom they justify killing by claiming that all adult Westerners are soldiers in the war on terror.

Khadr has not been let down by the Canadian nation, as his Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney insisted on Monday. He seems a remorseless individual, who has done all he can, before and since his capture, to spit on the Western values his supporters now appeal to. I blame no Canadian who is indifferent to what happens to him now.