Khadr Sentenced To 40 Years By Military Tribunal

[Tearloch7]

We cry justice. It is reasonable.

However, love or hate the military, this kid is fortunate that some buck sergeant respected the rules of engagement, the laws regarding ununiformed combatants and the chain of command, and did not put a bullet in his head back in Afghanistan.

[taxi]

I canna wait til you are in the same situation .. you know? .. when the Chinese invade, and you try to protect your home from foreign forces? .. oh wait .. never mind .. they will not shoot you if you hide under your bed!! ..

This is a freeking joke, the way they treated this kid .. and the USA policy on this is neanderthal .. the "American Empire" is sinking into the past and someday your citizens will pay a price .. sadly, almost a half of the USA's citizens are so ignorant they won't even know why ..

I live for the day they charge Bush-Cheney with war crimes, as they so deserve ..

[Sharpshooter]

Except that Khadr and his family weren't "defending their homeland". Khadr is a Canadian by nationality and an Egyptian/Palestinian by ethnicity. Afghanistan is in no way his homeland. Khadr and his father were part of a militant group that was propping up the arab backed Sunni governments on the Afghan people. He was doing no different than the US soldiers you condemn.

That being said Khadr was also a 15 year old child, whose parents put him in that awful situation. I'd be fine with letting him go and throwing his mother in prison.

[taxi]

Khadr was a child when his father took him to that area of the world. This was a child who looked up to his father, as many young boys do, even though he may not have fully understood the ramifications of what his father was doing. There's no defending the father, he's a dirtbag for taking his kid there in the first place.

Omar, as you contend, was never 'part' of any militant group despite the attempts of the US and now Canadian military and gov'ts to tie him to one. The US soldiers story at the time that they took him was concocted. Read through this thread, if you want a better sense of what the US military has done with Omar over the years and how their story doesn't add up.

[The Colt 45s]

Although I don't disagree that Omar may be an innocent, as he was a child, he was most certainly part of or at least worked very closely with at least one militant group. His training with various nasty people was well documented. There is video of him building IEDs. The family admits fighting alongside militant groups. The mlitant groups praise the Khadr family. You can argue that all the confeissions he's given about this particular incident are incorrect, but to say he was never part of a militant group is a little outrageous.

Even the claim that he was merely interpreting for Al-Queda members is enough to convict him. It's still illegal to aid and abed.

Here's a video of Omar here building bombs with Abu Laith al-Libi:

http://www.cbsnews.c...ch/?id=3518748n

These same mines and IEDs were later recovered from the road around where both Canadian and US soldiers were expected to be.

[Buddhas Hand]

I canna wait til you are in the same situation .. you know? .. when the Chinese invade, and you try to protect your home from foreign forces? .. oh wait .. never mind .. they will not shoot you if you hide under your bed!! ..

This is a freeking joke, the way they treated this kid .. and the USA policy on this is neanderthal .. the "American Empire" is sinking into the past and someday your citizens will pay a price .. sadly, almost a half of the USA's citizens are so ignorant they won't even know why ..

I live for the day they charge Bush-Cheney with war crimes, as they so deserve ..

[Sharpshooter]

We have to be careful with culture: while we as Canadians consider him to be a child, a teenager controlled by his father and tribe, in Afghanistan he was considered an adult. While we may not want to admit it, there are "children" who are fighting for the Taliban.

[Sharpshooter]

Although I don't disagree that Omar may be an innocent, as he was a child, he was most certainly part of or at least worked very closely with at least one militant group. His training with various nasty people was well documented. There is video of him building IEDs. The family admits fighting alongside militant groups. The mlitant groups praise the Khadr family. You can argue that all the confeissions he's given about this particular incident are incorrect, but to say he was never part of a militant group is a little outrageous.

Even the claim that he was merely interpreting for Al-Queda members is enough to convict him. It's still illegal to aid and abed.

Here's a video of Omar here building bombs with Abu Laith al-Libi:

http://www.cbsnews.c...ch/?id=3518748n

These same mines and IEDs were later recovered from the road around where both Canadian and US soldiers were expected to be.

[taxi]

Which is why he should have been treated as a 'child soldier' then at the least, because it would have afforded him international treaty rights that deal with child soldiers.....but he wasn't.

[Sharpshooter]

He doesn't qualify as a child soldier. You have to be under the age of 15. People between the age of 15 and 18 are allowed to voluntarily participate as soldiers.

From the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

The other issue is that the law is quite clear on prohibitions against recruiting child soldiers, but it doesn't really tell you how to deal with them as an oppossing force or what to do with them once captured.

[Red Light Racicot]

If Im not mistaken the Liberals were running the country when this whole situation developed. How come they never raised any objection in the first place?

[taxi]

That's incorrect.

[taxi]

If Im not mistaken the Liberals were running the country when this whole situation developed. How come they never raised any objection in the first place?

[DarthNinja]

Except that Khadr and his family weren't "defending their homeland". Khadr is a Canadian by nationality and an Egyptian/Palestinian by ethnicity. Afghanistan is in no way his homeland. Khadr and his father were part of a militant group that was propping up the arab backed Sunni governments on the Afghan people. He was doing no different than the US soldiers you condemn.

That being said Khadr was also a 15 year old child, whose parents put him in that awful situation. I'd be fine with letting him go and throwing his mother in prison.

[DarthNinja]

Khard was in jail for 4 years while the Liberals were in power. They made no efforts to secure his release. In fact, CSIS was directly invovled in getting confessions out of Khadr while the Liberals were in power. CSIS interrogated him many times between 2002 and 2006, when the Liberals were in power.

[taxi]

Actually Afghanistan was in a way very much like a homeland to Ahmed Khadr and in a way adopted it as his homeland. Khadr's father has had all types of accusations and allegations thrown his way that amounted to no convictions but he has actually done a tremendous amount of aid and charity work in Afghanistan for decades going back to the early 80's. He helped build and establish schools for boys and girls, orphanages, medical clinics, hospitals etc. He brought his children up with this as well. Almost everyone in Afghanistan either knew him or knew of him because of his work.

Now, you might argue that he and his children were training to learn combat and fighting etc. (though he has often been described by fighters as "not a man of jihad but a man of charity work and aid") but this is precisely what the Americans were striving for in order to defeat the invading and occupying USSR was it not?

Who was it that funded, armed, encouraged and supported Muslims from around the world to migrate to Afghanistan in order to fight the USSR? Are you aware that the US government permitted Taliban members to travel throughout the US and recruit soldiers from Muslim communities and Mosques for fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan?

Journalist Eric Margolis referred to Ahmed Khadr as a 'man of respect' as well as a 'humanitarian'.

The same people being referred to as 'terrorists' today are the same ones who were hailed as 'heros' and 'mujahideen' in the 80's and 90's (how easily people are programmed).

You'd be fine with letting Omar Khadr go and throw his mother in jail instead, but to me this sounds like nothing except a heavily tainted sense of justice due to where you get your info from. For example, it seems you still believe that such a thing called Al-Qaeda exists.

[The Colt 45s]

Which is why he should have been treated as a 'child soldier' then at the least, because it would have afforded him international treaty rights that deal with child soldiers.....but he wasn't.

[DarthNinja]

No correct.

That's a misinterpretation of the act. The act applies to those recruiting child soldiers and say that Guerilla forces shouldn't recruit. It, however, makes no mention of what to do when those guerilla forces actually do recruit. So techinically, if you captured a soldier between 15-18, you could still treat him as a regular soldier.

[Sharpshooter]

No correct.

That's a misinterpretation of the act. The act applies to those recruiting child soldiers and say that Guerilla forces shouldn't recruit. It, however, makes no mention of what to do when those guerilla forces actually do recruit. So techinically, if you captured a soldier between 15-18, you could still treat him as a regular soldier.

[DarthNinja]

The Khadr family, Osama Bin Laden, etc... initially entered Afghanistan for the purpse of removign the Soviets, but then stayed in order to pursue their own goals and agenda. Can you possibly argue that backing the Taliban had the best interest of the Afghan people as a whole in mind. They wanted to push their own religious agenda on the Afghan people, and they used them as pawns.

I'm not saying that what the USA did was any better, but your argument about "adopted homeland" is such garbage. Beginning in the early 90s, the agenda clearly switched from giving humanitarian aid to proping up a brutal regime, aka the Taliban. Arab/Pakistani led militias conducted numerous massacres in the region.

On the day in question, Omar Khadr, was caught with one of the most notorious Arab war mongerers, Abu Laith al-Libi. People like al-Libi care nothing about the Afghan people. He stated several times his goal was to impose islamic dictatorship on the world. He started with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The worst part was that people like al-Libi and Bin Laden lived a decadent lifestyle with multiple wives, while the Afghans suffered. The worst kind of chicken hawks.

Whether or not you want to believe that Al-Queda exists, there's no denying that people like al-Libi and Bin Laden had been employing gangs of arab and pakistani soldiers to prop up the Taliban and impose it on the Afghan people.