The New York Times Sums Up the Khadr Farce Quite Nicely

Rightwing thugs in Canada (and they're not all Tories either) haven't got the guts to denounce Omar Khadr's Kangaroo Kourt but today's editorial in The New York Times does just that - and very powerfully.

It is perhaps the best summation of this travesty yet published.  Read "Warped Justice."

Is Denying Protection to a Child Soldier a War Crime?

If it isn't, it should be.

The United States is a signatory to the Child Soldier protocol.   The United States therefore acknowledges that child soldiers can and are made to believe and do just about anything their adult mentors wish.   The United States therefore accepts that child combatants are to be treated as victims and, as such, agrees to furnish child soldiers with protection and rehabilitation.

So why, with Omar Khadr, did the United States turn its back on everything it acknowledged and undertook to do in signing the Child Soldier protocol?

Omar Khadr was not treated as a victim but as a war criminal.  Khadr was not protected and rehabilitated as the United States was obliged to do.   To the contrary, Khadr was housed within a community of radical Islamists where, by the prosecution's own witness, he was even further steeped in their beliefs.  In effect, the United States did just about everything conceivable to ensure that Khadr is today more radical and more dangerous than ever.

And now they blame Khadr for supposedly becoming everything that was entirely foreseeable from their own indifference and neglect.

Denying a prisoner food or water is a war crime.   Why should denying a child soldier protection and rehabilitation be any less a war crime?

Isn't That Exactly Why We're Supposed to Treat Them as "Child Soldiers"?

The prosecution in Omar Khadr's farcical trial has called evidence that stands as a scathing indictment of Guantanamo and America's hypocritical rejection of Khadr's child soldier status.   The giveaway is in the evidence of a forensic psychiatrist who painted Khadr as
an unrepentant, dangerous, Islamic extremist who has been “marinated in the radical jihadism” at Guantanamo.

Marinated in Radical Jihadism at Guantanamo?

That captures the whole essence of the child soldier protocol that even the United States embraced until it chose to turn rank hypocrite.  We know that child soldiers are susceptible to being 'marinated' in radical causes and that's why decent societies have agreed to treat them as victims, not perpetrators.

Worse still, the American forensic psychiatrist's evidence is that Khadr continued to be marinated in radical jihadism while in American captivity.   If the Americans couldn't protect their own young captive from radical jihadism in a place like Guantanamo, what do they think he was subjected to in Pakistan and Afghanistan?  Shouldn't some American honcho be charged with failing to protect Khadr while an inmate in America's toughest prison?  Just who allowed him to be 'marinated' while he was imprisoned in Cuba?

Bad as Khadr may have been, even may still be, this is a case in which the Americans have utterly lost any moral high ground.  To argue that Khadr should be further punished because the Americans allowed him to be 'radicalized' while in their hands is more than laughable, it's pathetic. 

Obama Frets Over Omar Khadr

The stench emitting from the military kangaroo court convened to try Omar Khadr has reached the White House and, according to The New York Times, has Obama & Company deeply troubled about the way the world sees America.

Mr. Khadr’s trial at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay started earlier in August but was put on a monthlong hiatus because a lawyer got sick and collapsed in court. The pause has allowed the administration to consider the negative images the trial has already generated.



Chief among them are persistent questions about the propriety of prosecuting a child soldier. Moreover, in a blow to establishing an image of openness, the Pentagon sought to ban journalists who wrote about publicly known information that it decreed should be treated as secret.


The judge declined to suppress statements Mr. Khadr made after an Army interrogator sought to frighten him with a fabricated story about an Afghan youth who disappointed interrogators and was sent to an American prison where he died after a gang rape. In a pretrial hearing, the interrogator confirmed making that implicit threat, but the judge ruled it did not taint Mr. Khadr’s later confessions.


And prosecutors disqualified an officer from the jury because he said he agreed with President Obama that Guantánamo had compromised America’s values and international reputation.

No matter how you feel about Omar Khadr, there's no justice for him to be had from this rigged, military tribunal that brings the United States the distinction of being the first Western nation to try a child soldier since America and most other nations signed a protocol expressly prohibiting child soldier prosecutions.

So, yes, Obama should be worried about the consequences to America from this travesty.  The world will not judge America kindly.