For Omar [updated x 3]

(2PM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

[Updated below after the click]

Forgive my inability to fully express the depth of grief I feel.

For Omar.

For justice. For peace.

For a future for my daughter and all our children sold off to the highest bidder.

God help us all.

See… Carol Rosenberg’s report here: Canadian pleads guilty to war crimes at Guantánamo court.

Carol’s tweet feed here.

or FDL’s emptywheel here.

[UPDATED noonish]:  CNN has this, just the facts Ma’am, for the quick refresher:

Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr pleaded guilty to charges against him Monday, the Pentagon said, in the first military commission trial there since Barack Obama became president.

Khadr, 24, was accused of throwing a grenade during a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan that resulted in the death of Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, a Special Forces medic.

Khadr, the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay, was 15 at the time. He faced a maximum sentence of life in prison.

He pleaded guilty to murder in violation of the laws of war, attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, conspiracy, two counts of providing material support for terrorism and spying in the United States, a Canadian diplomat said.

Also, there will still be a jury hearing on sentencing, apparently mostly a formality… unofficial word is the deal includes one more year at G’mo then he transfers to serve out the remaining 7 years in Canada (as opposed to the life sentence he was likely to get had he refused this “bargain”.

Details of the plea agreement are not made public, Lapan said, because the seven military officers on the jury “get the case without any knowledge of the pretrial agreement. They will issue a sentence for the record, and after that — if the judge allows it — the pretrial agreement can be revealed.”

If the jury’s sentence is different from the plea agreement, the shorter sentence will be imposed, Lapan said.

and more from Rosenberg’s tweets…

# #Guantanamo judge: I’ll release Pentagon deal, which states sentencing cap for Omar #Khadr, once jury has deliberated. http://ow.ly/2YTxG

# The guilty plea is an eight-page, 50 paragraph stipulation of facts, a narrative style confession and judge said we’ll get it Tuesday.

and

Judge: In his deal Omar #Khadr agrees to be “interviewed by U.S. personnel” while at #Guantanamo. At prison camps interview=interrogation.

[UPDATE #2 12:20PM]:  Human Rights First: Khadr Plea Deal Spares United States Further Scrutiny in Flawed Military Commission Case:

Following the announcement, Human Rights First’s Dixon Osburn stated, “The United States has an obligation to rehabilitate and repatriate a child soldier under the age of 18, and it failed to live up to that obligation with Khadr.  The plea deal means that the United States will not face possibly embarrassing details of torture against Khadr, or be subject to endless rounds of appeals that would challenge the constitutionality of the charges against him and the constitutional defects of the military commissions themselves. Today’s plea deal ends a flawed case in a fundamentally flawed system.”

Khadr was charged with murder in violation of the laws of war, conspiracy and material support of terrorism for acts that were not war crimes at the time of commission.  Had Khadr proceeded with trial and not accepted the government’s plea deal, appeals of the serious constitutional problems would likely take many more years to resolve. In addition, facts revealed during Khadr’s preliminary hearings suggest that the evidence against him was procured through torture.

Today’s plea agreement brings the total number of U.S. terrorism convictions in military commissions to five, including three plea agreements. Two of those individuals are already free. In sharp contrast, U.S. federal courts have convicted more than 400 terrorists since 9/11, including its most recent conviction of Faisal Shahzad to life in prison for his May 2010 botched Times Square car bombing attempt. Shahzad’s conviction came within six months of his attempted attack. {bolds mine}

[UPDATE #3, 1:48PM]: I was kinda wondering about this: Daphne Eviatar (I urge you to go read in full ~LL)

The lone survivor of a 2002 U.S. assault on an Afghan compound, Khadr was accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier.

But as he entered his guilty plea this morning — after the government agreed he’d serve just one more year at Guantanamo Bay, and an as-yet-unspecified number of years in Canada — it was clear that prosecutors had taken the opportunity to throw the kitchen-sink-full of charges at him – including far more crimes than he’d even been charged with. Most importantly, Khadr pled guilty to the murder of two Afghan soldiers who accompanied U.S. forces in the 2002 assault on the compound. The government has never presented any evidence whatsoever that Khadr was responsible for that.