The United States’ failure to recognize the lesser culpability of juveniles, at every stage of the incarceration and trial of Canadian Omar Khadr, shows that country’s military-justice system in a poor light.
The jury’s sentence of 40 years – on top of the eight Mr. Khadr already served in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – takes the breath away. Mr. Khadr was, by the evidence of the U.S. justice department, no older than 11 when his parents left Canada and began raising him in the terrorist camps of al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan. Forty-eight years for terrorism offences committed in those circumstances at age 15 – the military-justice system is blind to any notion of a different moral standard for young people.
Truly, Mr. Khadr had every reason to fear what might happen if he did not plead guilty in return for a lighter sentence of eight years, of which one will be served in the U.S. before he can apply for transfer to Canadian custody.
“The world is watching,” prosecutor Jeffrey Groharing told the jury before it deliberated. And what did it see? A bizarre spectacle: evidence that had been coerced from Mr. Khadr after he was drugged after surgery at 15, or after he was threatened with gang rape by an interrogator at around that same age, was permitted to be heard in court; a plea bargain that was coerced with the very real threat of a life sentence hanging over his head; a psychiatrist retained by the prosecution who called him the “rock star” of terrorists in a sentencing hearing.
And what role did Canada play? Shamefully, it sent its officials to bully him into giving out incriminating information that it then handed to his prosecutors, an act the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously condemned. The Canadian government then declared, “Let the process work.” Some process.
Who is Omar Khadr at 24, after all these years? Canadians may take encouragement from the testimony of Capt. Patrick McCarthy, a senior legal officer at Guantanamo from 2006-08, who said that Mr. Khadr did not seem to be a radical, and that he played a leadership role in mediating between Guantanamo staff and prisoners. Canadians may also take heart from his apology, coerced though it may have been, to Tabitha Speer, the widow of solder Christopher Speer, whose death by grenade he took responsibility for in his guilty plea.
Terrorism is monstrous, and Mr. Khadr is, or at least was, a terrorist; but a legal system that blindly puts retribution above all other values, including the different moral standard that should apply to young people, loses respect.
