The Globe: The United States’ failure to recognize the lesser culpability of juveniles, at every stage of the incarceration and trial of Canadian Omar Khadr, shows that country’s military-justice system in a poor light. The jury’s sentence of 40 years – on top of the eight Mr. Khadr already served in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – takes the breath away. Mr. Khadr was, by the evidence of the U.S. justice department, no older than 11 when his parents left Canada and began raising him in the terrorist camps of al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan. Forty-eight years for terrorism offences committed in those circumstances at age 15 – the military-justice system is blind to any notion of a different moral standard for young people.
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