The stories about Omar Khadr's "official" sentence are already up online: the military panel, unaware of the plea agreement, have returned a sentence of 40 years which is 15 more than the prosecution asked for. They were told they were sending a message and they certainly did. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people won't get the message they think they've sent.
The judge confirmed to Khadr out of earshot of the panel that the eight year sentence he agreed to in return for his guilty plea does stand. And we await confirmation that our own government has actually agreed to repatriate him after a year. But meanwhile he has at least that year to serve at Guantanamo and what's missing from that Globe and Mail story but has been reported on Twitter and elsewhere is that Khadr will spend that year in single-cell, maximum security. He'll be in solitary confinement for a year, broken only by whatever further interrogations the Americans may wish to put him through. And since he's now a convicted war criminal, according to standards no one else on the planet recognizes, I would imagine they'll use whatever interrogation measures they feel they can get away with.
I wrote a while back that I thought Barack Obama was the most disappointing president of my lifetime. The sentiment stands.
The jury could not have rendered a sentence other than the one they did, to do so would have ended their military careers. This sentence adds yet another layer to the farce that this entire episode has been from the outset.
History's judgment of us will not be kind.
Can hardly wait until Blair, Bush, Netenyahu and all the other real killers are put through the same treatment.
Oh, like that's going to happen.
Well, that's that then. They have successfully convicted someone who shouldn't have been on trial (because he was a child soldier) for something he probably didn't do, through a process that doesn't deserve the designation 'legal', on evidence that shouldn't have been allowed, but without evidence that should have been, of an act that has never before been considered a crime (fighting back on a battlefield).
And our government, far from helping its own citizen, helped his torturers. As is becoming standard for Canadian government.
And the media has successfully spun it such that most people have no understanding of what actually happened.
It is the most disgraceful abuse of the rule of law. The media in large part helped this happen as did all our cowardly politicians.