This is simply a disgusting case that offends any sense of decency, and makes both America and this president look no better than Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
When Barack Obama was running for president, he vowed to shut down the concentration camp at Guantanamo. He has not done that. He said, furthermore, that the very existence of that facility was harming America's image around the world. He was absolutely correct.
How outrageous then that he not only left the offshore prison in place but that for the first test of his new supposedly "fair" military tribunal process, he allowed the military prosecutors to choose the now 24-year-old Khadr.
Khadr should have been immediately released and repatriated to his native Canada when the president took office. Instead he now faces more time imprisoned at Guantanamo (he may eventually be released to Canadian authorities under the terms of his plea agreement, which has not been disclosed yet, but would face at least another year in Guantanamo's hell).
There is no good way to spin this atrocity. President Obama now stands guilty of a war crime--the abuse of a child soldier. Khadr's initial arrest and torture happened on Bush's watch, but of course, as with the rest of the torture that occurred during the Bush/Cheney years, President Obama has done nothing to prosecute the criminals who engaged in it or ordered it, or allowed it to happen. That dereliction of duty in itself by the current commander in chief, under the Geneva Conventions, is a war crime.
But all legal arguments aside, it is simply an abomination that this president has allowed the Pentagon to prosecute and force an admission of "guilt" from a child soldier who has literally grown up in the hellish environs of Guantanamo's concentration camp.
The guilty plea is a bad joke, designed to put lipstick on the ugly pig that is the president's war tribunal policy. As Khadr's attorney said, "There's not much choice. He either pleads guilty to avoid trial, or he goes to trial (in a military tribunal where the jury is composed of US military officers), and the trial is an unfair process." Military tribunals, significantly, allow testimony that has been obtained through torture, while such evidence is inadmissible in any American court of law.
When I wrote The Case for Impeachment, I warned that if Congress did not impeach the president and vice president for their myriad crimes, including massive serial violations of the Geneva Conventions, any future president would feel completely free to continue committing those crimes.
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