The Abominable Trial of Omar Khadr

Well I see the military jury at the kangaroo trial of Omar Khadr has dropped its pants, squatted over a hole in the ground, and...um...delivered its symbolic sentence.  

And no doubt given Stephen Harper a warm fuzzy feeling and/or a woody.

Omar Khar was sentenced today to 40 years in prison for murder, terrorism and spying by a military panel unaware that the confessed Canadian war criminal had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence capped at eight years and the chance to return to Canada after one more year in Guantanamo.

By sentencing Khadr to FIFTEEN years more than even the war criminals at the Pentagon had demanded.  Even though he almost certainly killed no one, and the only reason he was singled out for prosecution, as I explained in this post.

Was so the Pentagon could lower the bar of justice and international law so much, they could do ANYTHING to ANYONE.

So now all I want to know is when can that jury and that Stalinesque court be arrested for crimes against a child soldier? And what is the Harper government waiting for to demand that Omar be brought home IMMEDIATELY?

For that barbarous sentence only serves to prove beyond all doubt that the trial was a travesty.

"Everything about Omar Khadr's ordeal at Guantanamo Bay over the past eight years has been a fiasco," Mr. Neve said. "It comes as no surprise that the sentencing phase and this stunningly punitive jury decision has so starkly highlighted the injustices of this process."

And sentencing him to spend another year, in a maximum security section of that hideous gulag called Guantanamo, is an abominable act of cruelty and judicial torture.

Oh well. I'll have more to say about this in the days ahead when I'm not so angry. But tonight I just want to pay tribute to the extraordinary strength of that young Canadian, who has been victimized by just about everyone.

His own family, the Taliban, the Pentagon torturers, two Canadian governments. And abandoned by so many of his own people.













But although he is still riddled with shrapnel and blind in one eye, has somehow managed to endure, and is by all accounts a decent and gentle guy.

I also want to salute Khadr's defence team, Canadians like Dennis Edney, as well as the members of the U.S. military, who criticized their superiors and their own government to stand up for the rule of law.

“Al-Qaeda uses kids, they had radicalized him,” Col. Jackson said, reminding the panel that Mr. Khadr is considered internationally to be a “child soldier,” a victim, rather than a combatant who can’t, under United Nation’s protocol’s be held accountable for war crimes.

And by so doing tried to save the honour of their country. Unlike their weak and cowardly President.

The verdict of history will be harsher on Obama, and Harper, and all the others, than today's abominable sentence was on Khadr.

And what else can you say eh?

Except that for Canada the shame will last FOREVER.

And that NOTHING will ever change the truth. Omar Khadr was a child soldier.

And he lives HERE...