Khadr Sentenced To 40 Years By Military Tribunal

[Sharpshooter]

The reason I go on these "silly" "tangents" is because the current laws are rife for explotation.

If that's such a bad thing my I recomend next time you think about lighting up a fatty how much you feel compelled to never challenge the existing, real, and current laws.

[avelanch]

Why change from the usual diet of bizarre tangents and playing silly bugger?

[Wetcoaster]

Even the National Post which is our equivalent of Fox News glorifying all things authoritarian and pushing a law and order agenda... and not known as champion of the civil liberties and other such things found the proceedings before the illegal military tribunal resulting in the guilty plea by Omar Khadr repugnant.

The article was written by Tony Kelly a former editor of the Financial Post (the sister publication of the National Post).

The headline?

Stalin would have been proud

In the 1930s, that great legal innovator Joseph Stalin introduced the show trial. The accused would stand up in court and willingly, even eagerly, confess to the most fantastical crimes. At the first great show trial, in 1936, Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and other former senior Communist party members admitted to being members of a terrorist organization. They said they had plotted to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. In the following years, as Stalin's purges picked up steam, show trials featured increasingly incredible stories, usually involving the accused admitting to being agents of Western imperialism.

What made men confess to things that were unlikely, sometimes impossible and usually unsupported by other evidence? Torture. Sleep deprivation, beatings, and threats against their wives and children. To stop the pain, you had to confess to whatever it was that the interrogators wanted to hear. And then you had to get up in court and willingly confess to it all over again.

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, "murder in violation of the laws of war" (a crime that doesn't appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes, shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims -- credibly, given all that we know about what went on at Bagram -- that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the bathroom.

His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death. Ponder that for a moment.

He was interviewed about 25 times by this interrogator, Joshua Claus. Claus was also the interrogator for an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was chained to the ceiling and beaten to death in Bagram in 2002; Claus pled guilty to his involvement in the affair and received a five month sentence. In a lovely Orwellian touch, the U.S. government insisted that reporters covering Khadr's trial not name Claus, but instead refer to him as "Interrogator 1."

In Bagram, Khadr confessed that he had thrown the grenade that killed an American soldier. No one saw him do this, so his confession is really the only evidence of the act. Last summer, U.S. military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish ruled that the confession, despite the obviously coercive circumstances under which it was made, had been freely given, and could be used against Khadr in court.

This week, Omar Khadr was offered the following choice: plead guilty, or face two different routes to life in prison. He could go to trial, and thanks to a confession that would be laughed out of any real court of law, he'd probably be convicted. But even if the court somehow found him not guilty, the U.S. reserved the right to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant. The only sure way to get out of jail early was to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

On Monday, Khadr was even forced to cop to other crimes, including the killing of two Afghan soldiers, something he wasn't even charged with, and for which the prosecution appears to have had no evidence. And, in a nice touch that Stalin would have appreciated, Khadr appears to have also been forced to sign away his right to sue his jailors for the various forms of deprivation and abuse that he was subject to. In court on Monday, Col. Patrick Parrish repeatedly asked Khadr to confirm that he was agreeing to these terms willingly, that he really, truly, sincerely wanted to plead guilty all of his own accord. Khadr said yes. They could have told him to confess that he had simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would have done it.

And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S. military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history, including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models, such as those that captured American troops had been subjected to during the Korean War.

The original communist torture techniques, which for a time inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions: That was the whole point. They were designed to force people to say what interrogators wanted to hear -- yes, I am a capitalist stooge, yes I am a Trostkyite, yes I am a terrorist.

And now Guantanamo's very first military tribunal has its first guilty verdict, thanks to those methods of coercion first perfected for the Soviet Bloc show trial.

My God, what have we done? Somewhere in hell, Joseph Stalin is smiling.

http://www.nationalpost.com/Stalin+would+have+been+proud/3737862/story.html#ixzz1448vTdW6

Or as Omar Khadr's first military defence counsel stated to similar effect, he would have counselled him to plead guilty to the JFK assassination if it would have got him out of the sham legal proceedings in the hell hole that is Guantanamo Bay and returned to Canada... where he should have been sent in the first place.

[ronthecivil]

Challenging laws are well and good. I don't see anything challengeable about the Charter, in Khadr's case, or citizenship in general. Restructuring laws that govern citizenship would require a vote akin to Meech Lake. There is no credible reason to postulate that our laws governing citizenship are legally or morally challengeable. It's a moot point and an excercise in futile brainstorming. What's the point?

[Wetcoaster]

I like to think outside the box or at least look at why other ways of doing things don't work. You should change from consending and insulting those that don't think like you.

If there's nothing we can do about people that don't deserve Canadian citizenship then so be it but you make it seem stupid to even think about it when the fact of the matter is that not thinking about various scenarios must be what lawyers do since there's so many laws out there that fail to take into account "unforseeable" circumstances.

[avelanch]

[ronthecivil]

I find his lawyering to be quite enjoyable and endearing.

[Wetcoaster]

Fair enough.

I have a sayings. It's "if you have a back up plan you can risk it". If the back up plan turns out to be hard to do it's good to know it's doable should the circumsances warrant it.

Oh, and the governement can always use the nothwithstanding clause should something get too hairy. If I was Al Quida my number one goal would be to make sure all my terrorists were home grown and children so they could act with impunity.

[Wetcoaster]

It looses it's charm when it simply couched insults.

[ronthecivil]

I have a saying too - get a clue before spouting off.

Here is the notwithstanding clause:

Parliament or the legislature of a province may expressly declare in an Act of Parliament or of the legislature, as the case may be, that the Act or a provision thereof shall operate notwithstanding a provision included in section 2 or sections 7 to 15 of this Charter.

How exactly do you propose the federal government to use the notwithstanding clause for prior Charter breaches and illegal acts?

Oh and on how many occasions has the federal government resorted to the notwithstanding clause since 1982 when the Charter was enacted? Here is a hint - what is the value of less than one?

Why? Because it would be political suicide.

Yet another bizarre tangent and non-thinking outside the box. Chalk up yet another silly bugger point.

[ronthecivil]

You confuse criticism of an unfounded and uninformed opinion and the manner in which it is formed with insults.

[Wetcoaster]

If I was Al Quadi I would be taking notes on all of this so if I wanted to make a domestic terror cell (and before you silly bugger that they exist in England) I could get some lawyers (kind of like how the IRA and other terror groups had a "civilian" branch) and voila lots of fun could be had training the kids to go boom.

Maybe the reason they haven't used it is a combination of it being kind of new (don't need to go against the charter when it doesn't exist, which historically would have happened a lot) and not really having a need. That doesn't mean it won't happen ever, just like an act of terrorism could very well end up happening here. And if your wondering how the government would react, last time something remotely close to terrorism at home happened, i seem to recall the government pulled out the war measures act.

[Wetcoaster]

You confuse having a difference of opinion as the difference being worthless. I know the law system is based on the adversarial method but one would think you learned your lesson on making your day to day interaction be based on the same way. Actualy, THAT is being a silly bugger, the evidence certainly wouldn't agree with that. Of course you haven't learned your lesson.

[ronthecivil]

When one plays silly bugger and expresses worthless opinions without foundation - expect to be called upon it.

[ronthecivil]

Or perhaps more likely you simply do not have clue about the issues and just blather on.

You may have missed the news as we have domestic terror cells in Canada as well. However they have the right to a fair trial and all their Charter rights are respected.

http://www.thestar.c...ced-to-16-years

[Wetcoaster]

But comparing Canadian and US governements to Stalin is fair game. Whatever.

Keep on weeping for the plight of Canada's self described "Al Quida family" and the quest to get them re-united. Anything else is worthless and uninformed.

[Wetcoaster]

I am not at all shocked about the domestic terror cells. What is shocking is the kid gloves they are treated with. I guess it will take one of the to suceed before something is done about it.

[ronthecivil]

That analogy seems to fit quite nicely and the author manged to provide logical and cogent arguments with specific historical events to support his thesis - something lacking in the majority of your posts on this issue.

I have never wept for anyone. All I expect is that everyone be given a fair and legal trial respecting the rule of law and Charter rights and in accordance with international law. That did not occur with Omar Khadr.

Again off on a bizarre tangent.

[ronthecivil]

Again another off the cuff uninformed opinion.

[Wetcoaster]

How is it uninformed?

You linked the existance of terror cells. I haven't heard of any major crackdowns other than the one you listed. Is that the full extant of terror cells and we can consider the issue nipped in the bud?