By focusing so completely on avoiding international law, by presuming what has gone before is inapplicable or wrong, it’s tough not to mess things up:
…the chief military defense lawyer here, Col. Dwight Sullivan of the Marines, said he viewed the decision as having broad impact because it underscored what he and other critics have described as a commission process that lacks international legitimacy and legal authority. “How much more evidence do we need that the military commission process doesn’t work?” asked Colonel Sullivan.
I am not going to defend Khadr – not so much as the fact that I have no interest in doing so but really because Darcey will call me funny names and then tell all his pals – but what is the value of Canadian citizenship if we don’t lift a finger (even when the UK has tried and Australia has succeeded for its similarly situated citizens), what is the point of speaking out against child soldiers elsewhere when one carrying our passport doesn’t raise the slightest concern? Now as a man and no longer a child – and a man who has likely been indoctrinated in the Cuban jail more than his terrorist father could have ever wished – he is could well be more intent on murder than he was when fighting in Afghanistan. I don’t doubt it myself.
But maybe now it is time to just try them on good old international law or hold them as run of the mill combatant detainees, you know – POWs, seeing as the war in Afghanistan still continues, and move on from trying to prove the situation is unprecedented. Group Project rules apply. Now at five and a half years of the war in Afghanistan, have things gotten to a point where in perspective we see acts on the battlefield were the acts of war rather than the acts of terrorists?