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So, what I am gathering here is that any time the Americans get into a confrontation with someone in Afghanistan, the someone either: escapes, is killed or brought to gitmo. I know the Canadians in Afghanistan recently got into trouble (at least in the media) for handing over prisoners to Afghani police, because they knew they were going to torture them. Do Americans also hand over prisoners to local authorities? Or does everyone "lucky" enough to survive get a trip half way around the planet to Cuba?

Re: gitmo detainees, the sense that I have is that it was the destination of choice for prisoners taken early in the war (I'm not sure that new prisoners continue to go there.) It was a wide swath (hearsay reports counted as information strong enough to warrant transportation there.) The prime purpose, of course, was to hold them, as alison mentioned, in a place where they would be under US control but not subject to US law. (Although the Supreme Court ruled that, regardless of their location, habeas corpus still applied -- another issue altogether.) Nowadays, Bagram has replaced Guantanamo as the destination for terror suspects from the Afghan war, to considerably less media scrutiny, but likely to no less mistreatment.

Does anyone know if there were any other survivors along with Khadr? or did everyone else in the house die? If there were survivors, did they also end up in gitmo and because they are most likely Afghani and not Canadian, remain un-noticed by western or pososibly all media?

If the Americans typically don"t take prisoners, what might the death toll be? Why do I feel like they don't keep track?

According to wikipedia, there were only two survivors of the apache rocket attack on the compound, and only Omar Khadr survived the following firefight, during which the alleged grenade attack occurred.

And you feel like they don't keep track because they don't keep track very well, and there's no incentive for them to do so. Moreover, the truth is that we don't see many media reports of casualties because "xx afghans were killed today" is neither unique nor gripping for a Western audience. This diminishes not only those lives that are lost, but obscures the true cost of a war of choice on the population we are meant to be helping, as well as the toll it takes on those we purportedly exalt as "defending our freedom."

Leaving aside the broader questions about Afghanistan, with respect to Omar Khadr, the reason we should care that he is Canadian is not that his situation is only worth caring about because of his citizenship, but rather that our government has an obligation to him as a citizen that is going unfulfilled. He remains the only citizen of a Western nation in Guantanamo. His legal status has been irresponsibly left up in the air by both Liberal and Conservative governments.

There are arguments made that his family is despicable and that he is merely a citizen of convenience and therefore we owe him no obligation. The former is assuredly true, but while people may like the latter to be true, Canadian tradition and law make no distinctions among forms of citizenship. It may be for Parliament to decide such a distinction is required or "ought to exist", but it does not exist and Omar Khadr is as much a citizen as you or me or Stephen Harper or Paul Martin and our obligation to him remains as it would for anyone else. That's the only issue here that relates to him being Canadian, that's our obligation to him, and that's where we have failed.

Not that I expect that to change -- he's an unsympathetic character and neither potential governing party would dare grant him what he is due for fear of looking weak on terrorism. So, here we are.

(I leave it to individuals to decide which of these two are "strong on terror":
(i) upholding one's principles and trusting one's values to be stronger than cowards who would have us change our way of life because of their violence; vs.
(ii) throwing our principles to the wind and alienating people who we need on our side because of groups who more often than not employ fanatical morons to perform their cowardly acts.)