because,
according to his attorney:
He’s agreed to accept this deal because when he looks at the alternatives and the alternatives are that he’s in a military process…that has been condemned by military prosecutors themselves who say that it is designed to make findings of guilt. He faced the potential of life in prison under this system here because the jury is hand picked, the judge is hand picked, the prosecution is hand picked and the military defense is hand picked. And then what I think really capped it all off was, much of the evidence against Omar are statements that he made while being abused and tortured and under duress. So the cards were stacked.
The main charge was killing a soldier on the battlefield, which normally isn't prosecuted, particularly in the case of children. The military "to make the case that Khadr lacked military immunity." One of the factors was Khadr wasn't wearing a military uniform. Here is what further appalled me -- the "Obama administration's shocking reaction to this conundrum:"
The uniform issue also led to a scramble by the Obama legal team to rewrite commission rules on the eve of a hearing for Mr. Khadr. Because Central Intelligence Agency drone operators also kill while not wearing uniforms, the team rewrote the rules to downgrade “murder in violation of the laws of war” to a domestic law offense from a war crime to avoid seeming to implicitly concede that the C.I.A. is committing war crimes.
They didn't stop there:
In court today, they added two more charges that we’d never heard of and it seems to be that he is responsible for everybody that got injured or killed in that fight in the compound with the Taliban. <...> These charges that Omar faces are unknown under the laws of war. The Americans made them up in order to justify detaining people who didn’t wear a uniform in the battlefields of Afghanistan...
The sentence is serving one more year in Guantanamo and then repatriation to Canada to serve the remaining 7 years. As some legal scholars have pointed out, it's probably the best outcome for him as he's unlikely to have to serve even close to his full term in Canada.
(See
Think Progress for more & some reactions; All emphases are Think Progress'.)
In a
different article, Chip Pitts, a lecturer at Stanford Law School, said:
This plea bargain shouldn't be taken as indication of the legitimacy of the irredeemably tainted military commissions; it was precisely their illegitimacy and one-sidedness that led Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, a juvenile at the time of arrest who was brought into the horror of war by his father and had maintained his innocence of the murder charges until the last minute, to finally succumb to the pressure of a potential life sentence and agree to a plea bargain (including to novel "war crimes" not recognized as such at the time).
He added:
The precedent set – of extracting a plea by threatening a child soldier with harsh charges and an unfair trial, instead of undertaking the rehabilitation contemplated by international treaties – is a notable setback for international human rights law.
Though the original incarceration & torture occurred under Bush, the final outcome came under the Obama administration, including the "notable setback for international human rights law" Frankly, the fact that Obama failed to prosecute the war criminals but vigorously prosecuted this young man adds to my disgust. Not only did he not prosecute them, he lends his credence to the view that confessions and statements made under torture are legitimate fodder for prosecution.
Color me saddened, angry and pretty disgusted. Khadr was 15 when he was apprehended. FIFTEEN! I know this is old news but damn, I'm so saddened by the actions of the Obama administration. I seriously try to look at the positives when it comes to Obama but then I'm reminded about the degree to which too many of the Bush administrations most heinous policies have continued under Obama. Yeah, he's done some good things....he's also done some seriously terrible things. This is one of them.
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