Khadr Verdict Too Much. Or Too Little.

Omar Khadr will serve no more than eight years in jail for war crimes, and this is totally unacceptable to virtually everybody.

The Globe and Mail’s editorial board condemns the U.S. military-justice system that convicted Khadr for crimes committed at 15 as being “blind to any notion of a different moral standard for young people.” The Globe argues that the Khadr’s prosecutors were concerned more with exacting revenge for the death of a U.S. soldier than justice, and that “a legal system that blindly puts retribution above all other values, including the different moral standard that should apply to young people, loses respect.”

Sun Media’s Ezra Levant is, as usual, outraged and scared, this time at the prospect Khadr will be paroled in Canada. Reportedly Khadr has said he took pleasure in remembering the murder he confessed to, and Levant says this puts him on par with Canada’s most notorious killers. “That’s Russell Williams stuff. It’s Paul Bernardo territory. Normal people would feel remorse or disgust at taking a life … Let Khadr serve his time in a U.S. prison, not on Canadian streets.”

There is usually no quicker way to discredit your argument than by raising the spectre of Hitler or Stalin, so Tony Keller is toeing a fine line when he declares in the National Post that “Stalin would have been proud” of the cobbled-together process used to convict Khadr. It was Stalin who invented the show trial in the 1930s to coerce his political opponents into confessing nonexistent crimes through torture, and Keller argues that’s exactly what Khadr’s trial was. Given the acknowledged abuse Khadr endured while in jail and the lengthy sentence he was facing, Keller says prosecutors “could have told him to confess that he had simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would have done it.”

Meanwhile, the Globe’s Norman Spector speculates Stephen Harper might not risk angering his base by approving Khadr’s repatriation, Sun Media’s Brian Lilley blogs that the Conservatives will have to execute a Bill Clinton-esque semantic tap dance to explain their denials about Khadr’s plea deal, and the Post’s Stephen Taylor tests the limits of plausibility by asking what treatment Khadr would get under Prime Minsiter Jack Layton.