Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Khadr's Kangaroo Kourt

This reminds me of those old films that recorded an anti-Nazi being harangued by a German judge before being summarily condemned.

The prosecution in the Khadr case has called a forensic psychiatrist to give evidence that both indicts America for the conditions at Guantanamo and seeks to punish Khadr for them.  This is insane.

The psychiatrist says Khadr is enormously dangerous because, during his years as an American captive at Guantanamo, he was steeped in Islamic radicalism.   In other words, the Americans put this child soldier in a place where he could be freely indoctrinated in radicalism - in their very own super prison under their very own control.  

Isn't the Child Soldier protocol specifically intended to recognize that kids can be indoctrinated by adults to do or believe almost anything?   Isn't the Child Soldier protocol intended to therefore see child combatants as victims in need of protection and rehabilitation when they're captured?  Doesn't just about everything the Americans did with and to Khadr while he was their captive just fly in the face of the Child Soldier protocol which the U.S. has itself signed?

Instead of meeting its obligations to give Khadr protection and rehabilitation, the United States left him to stew in a cauldron of  Islamic radicalism called Guantanamo,  a cauldron of their own making, and then seek to blame him for the very conditions they imposed on him.

Only in a total kangaroo court would that sort of argument be received.  It's the sort of thing that erases any doubt about the fairness and integrity of the military tribunal that will pass judgment on Omar Khadr.

1 comment:

The Mound of Sound said...

I see this post has come to the attention of someone at Headquarters, USAISC, in Arlington, Virginia. That would be the U.S. Army Information Systems Command, a branch of military intelligence. Of course if the American military had any intelligence they wouldn't have left Khadr to be steeped in Islamist radicalism at Gitmo all those years. I guess it really is an oxymoron.