Youngest Guantanamo detainee pleads guilty

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Youngest Guantanamo detainee pleads guilty
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 25, 2010; 10:46 AM

Omar Khadr, the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pleaded guilty to five terrorism charges, including murder, on Monday as part of a plea agreement in which he will serve a reduced sentence, much of it in Canada, his home country.

The deal has been months in the making and offers both the Obama administration and Khadr a way out of a full-blown trial that carried significant risks for both.

Khadr was 15 when he killed a U.S. Special Forces medic with a grenade during a firefight in Afghanistan. U.N. officials and human rights groups have argued that he was a "child soldier" who had been radicalized by his father and that he should be rehabilitated, not prosecuted.

Senior Obama administration officials feared the trial of a juvenile offender would taint the reformed system of military commissions that they want to use, in conjunction with federal trials, to prosecute terrorism suspects.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102500383.html?hpid=topnews

[gateley]

1. Wow - I don't know how I feel about this. Those kids in Afghanistan

don't know anything other than what they've been taught. They've been desensitized to death and torture LONG before the age of 15.