For the moment, the only thing I’m saying is: being fifteen doesn’t remove the possibility of adult criminal liability. Since the OP says he objects to that, I’m trying to determine if he really does, or if the crime itself makes a difference.
In other words, is his argument:
-or-
If he were released it seems likely that he’d just do it again. I don’t know what else you expect to be done.
#2 would be my choice. He was a child soldier, who was mentally prepared and armed by adults who were using him as a child weapon. I assume you’re familiar with the problem of child soldiers around the world, and the fact that most civilized countries recognize that these young people should not be punished because they were forced into combat situations by their elders.
What made Khadr’s crime so heinous and egregious? What made the death of this soldier so much more important and horrible, compared with the equally horrible deaths of 1224 US service men and women in Afghanistan, and 4745 in Iraq?
Are there going to be another 6000 or so trials to come? Is Khadr the only evil terrorist you’ve managed to catch?
I also note that when he was 15, after he was shot and captured, his interrogators let him know that his eventual fate (if he did not confess) was to be thrown in a prison where he would be raped to death. His “confession” came soon after. I guess it was OK to do that to him though, since he is clearly the “worst of the worst”. The absolute baddest dude that the US managed to get a guilty plea from.
I’m not sure if I am convinced that if released, he’d just “do it again”. Perhaps he would, but only if a group of heavily armed men were shooting at him, and trying to kill him.
He planted bombs and admitted to targeting civilians but you don’t think he’d do it again unless heavily armed men were shooting at him?
I’m really not sure what he actually did. I know what he confessed to doing after he was kept in Guantanamo for 8 years, and hoped to get out of there one day.
In any case, do you think that everyone who confesses to a crime should be kept in jail forever, just in case they re-offend?
Is the system of justice in the US still functional?
If he didn’t hate America when we got him, sure couldn’t blame him if he did now.
While I have mixed feeling about this, fifteen years old hardly seems like a “child soldier” even if that is the technical definition.
He shouldn’t be just let go but I don’t think the best recourse was to throw him in jail for 40 years.
He’s a kid that’s been brainwashed. He should be rehabbed. Sorry for the death of the serviceman, but in a battlefield, you defend yourself first. I probably would have done the same thing
And if he’d died, littering.
I dunno man. If the last time I shot at anyone I got sent to Happy Funtime Torture Resort for 1/3rd of my existence to date, with40 fucking years more hanging over my head, I probably wouldn’t be inclined to give it another go if freed. But that’s just me.
There seem to be a couple of different claims in this thread.
If I can be so bold as to distill them, it seems that many people objecting to this sentence, even though suggesting that the issue is the age of the accused, agree that age is not an absolute bar for this kind of sentence. Their actual objection seems to be that his conviction should be suspect because of an insufficiency of evidence; that since his confession was obtained improperly, it should be inadmissible.
Is that a fair summary?
You know what? I share your outrage. A gun doesn’t care how old the finger that pulls the trigger is. A bomb doesn’t care how old the finger that pushes the button is.
Little bastard should have been taken out and shot.
So should all those servicemembers be tortured and tossed into prison for 40 years too? They after all have killed far more people. Or is it only the deaths of servicemembers that count?
He’s probably fairly insane after years of American brutality.
So let’s imagine a three-year-old, whose parents leave alone for a moment with a radio detonator, press the button and blows up the café down the street.
Little bastard should have been taken out and shot?
Really for me, the invading a foreign country and then charging the people who shoot back with murder is the most outrageous part of this whole deal. The fucking families crying about the justice of it all as if Kadhr killed their father/husband while he was out grocery shopping or something.
No, I think a lot of us think it’s unfair to charge soldiers with murder.
So in your ideal world, the US Justice system would operate more along the lines of China’s?
Or the Taliban’s?
Partly, yes. I believe that the military tribunal that convicted and sentenced him has far more latitude for accepting “evidence” that is obtained than a civilian court. While I understand the reasons for this (It’s harder to maintain purity of evidence on a battlefield), it is my opinion that Khadr is being used as a scapegoat for the 6000 US military deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, admittedly, did Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris. But he had a spiffy blue uniform on when he did it.
I’m just not seeing a big deal here.
The kid’s life was already fucked up royally before any combat action occurred.
He was the citizen of a country that was safe and secure.
Daddy goes and hypes him up on some rah-rah about a war on the other sided of the world. A war that started when the ruling class of the homeland (?) nurtured fighters who attacked civilians of his country’s (Canada) biggest ally.
So even though he’s a citizen of Canada he’s joining a side that his country opposes. Did I mention that he’s still a citizen of Canada?
At this point I would say that anything this kid does for the rest of his life is going to be a major cluster fuck anyway.
So he in effect, goes to war with daddy to fight against his country and ends up in a combat situation.
He’s not an Afghan soldier, he’s not even a citizen. So what is he?
Well, he’s a guy who threw a grenade at a soldier, killing him.
So then he gets caught and some people want to kill him, some want to give him a long prison sentence and some here want to turn him loose because he’s just a boy.
I tend to dislike the “turn him loose” idea. Admittedly it has its positives - compassion, hope, salvation, charity. But I still think that the rest of this guy’s life is a going to be a cluster fuck. If he’s dead he don’t throw any more grenades. If he’s in prison, he will probably throw more grenades but he’s going to have to wait 40 years.
Like I said, I’m OK with that.
What happened to the Volk Deutsch who went back to the Fatherland and served in the Wehrmacht in World War II? In particular, what happened to the ones from the U.S.?
There’s a reference to them in an early episode of Band Of Brothers - Day of Days I think.