Child Soldier, Omar Khadr, Pleads Guilty in Plea Agreement

Peacenik doesn't understand why a child soldier is being charged with anything. But when the U.S. is making the rules anything can happen. Disgusting. As is the Harper governments silence. Time to bring the troops home now. And Omar Khadr




Khadr's defense team say he was pushed into fighting the US by his father, said to be a close associate of Osama bin Laden. Human rights defenders have criticised Barack Obama, the US president, for seeking to prosecute Khadr.

A Canadian prisoner in Guantanamo Bay has pleaded guilty to killing an American soldier while he was a young teenager as part of a deal that will allow him to avoid a war crimes trial.

Omar Khadr on Monday pleaded guilty to five charges, including murder, for throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. He was just 15 at the time of the incident, which occurred during a fierce firefight at an al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan.

Khadr, now 24, also admitted to planting improvised explosive devices and receiving weapons training from al-Qaeda. His defence lawyers say that because Khadr was a child when the offences occurred, he should not be tried for war-crimes.

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The Omar Khadr travesty

punditman says...As punditman noted here, this case is truly bizarre. Punditman continues to view this case as something right out off the scale in terms of propaganda and hypocrisy. Glenn Greenwald echoes the thoughts of punditman when he says: 

...how can it possibly be that the U.S. invades a foreign country, and then when people in that country -- such as Khadr -- fight back against the invading army, by attacking purely military targets via a purely military act (throwing a grenade at a solider, who was part of a unit ironically using an abandoned Soviet runway as its outpost), they become "war criminals," or even Terrorists, who must be shipped halfway around the world, systematically abused, repeatedly declared to be one of "the worst of the worst," and then held in a cage for almost a full decade (one third of his life and counting)?  It's hard to imagine anything which more compellingly underscores the completely elastic and manipulated "meaning" of "Terrorist" than this case:  in essence, the U.S. is free to do whatever it wants, and anyone who fights back, even against our invading armies and soldiers (rather than civilians), is a war criminal and a Terrorist.

By Glenn Greenwald

The only real reason I thought Robert Gibbs' comments yesterday merited a response is not because of the ephemeral melodrama it created -- the White House said Fox-copying, mean things about the Left -- but because of the "substantive" claim he made that comparisons of Bush and Obama were so blatantly insane that they merited "drug testing."  That Obama has vigorously embraced and at times even exceeded some of Bush's most controversial and radical policies is simply indisputable.  I'd request that anyone doubting that just review the very partial list I compiled in Update II yesterday.  In that list, I neglected to mention numerous other compelling examples (recall Tim Dickinson's recent revelation that Interior employees call their Department under Ken Salazar's corporate-serving rule "the third Bush term").  Among my most prominent omissions was the Obama administration's Bush-copying use of military commissions rather than real courts to try "War on Terror" detainees. 

Military commissions were one of those Bush/Cheney policies which provoked virtually universal outrage among progressives and Democrats back in the day when executive power abuses and rule of law transgressions were a concern.  The Obama administration's claim that the commissions are now improved to the point that they provide a forum of real justice is being put to the test -- and blatantly failing -- with the first such commission to be held under Obama:  that of Omar Khadr, accused of throwing a grenade in 2002 which killed an American solider in Afghanistan, when Khadr was 15 years old.  This is the first trial of a child soldier held since World War II, explained a U.N. official who condemned these proceedings.   The commission has already ruled that confessions made by Khadr which were clearly obtained through coercion, abuse and torture will be admitted as evidence against him.  Prior to the commencement of Khadr's "trial," the commission ruled in another case that the sentence imposed on a Sudanese detainee Ibrahim al-Qosi -- convicted as part of a plea bargain of the dastardly crime of being Osama bin Laden's "cook" -- will be kept secret until he is released.  What kind of country has secret sentences?

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In the matter of Omar Khadr, shame on us

Lawrence Martin

You either support high standards of justice or you don’t.

To avoid depression over the standards of justice in this country, here’s a tip: Stay away from opinion polls on Omar Khadr.

If you ever thought Canadians were a progressive, fair-minded people who believed in equal rights before the law, these soundings tell a different story.

They say most Canadians don’t want the Toronto-born Mr. Khadr to be returned to Canada from Guantanamo Bay for a legitimate judicial process. All other nations have repatriated their Gitmo detainees. Led by our counterclockwise Justice Department, we are the lone heathen holdout.

In the case of the 23-year-old Mr. Khadr, we invoke a double standard. We’re saying he’s not entitled to the same judicial rights as others. In so doing, we turn our backs on repeated rulings of our top courts that his rights have been violated, that we’re failing “to comply with a fundamental principle of justice.”

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After four years of non-stop, pro-war, pro-violence propaganda, including Hockey Night in Canada's eager participation, is it any wonder that Canadians no longer have a sense of what is right or wrong in the so called war on terror. War crimes. What dat? Civil rights. Who cares? Peacenik says it is time to bring Mr. Khadr, a child soldier, home. And it is time to bring the troops home.