Gitmo Teen Terrorist Sentenced
The Los Angeles Times reports:
A military jury on Sunday sentenced former child soldier Omar Khadr of Canada to 40 years more imprisonment for war crimes, including the battlefield death of a U.S. soldier.
The sentence was the harshest to come out of a contested military commissions trial. It was 15 years longer than even the prosecution had sought.
But the sentence was essentially meaningless because a pretrial agreement, kept secret from the jury, limited Khadr's term to eight years, meaning he would have to serve only one more year in U.S. custody.
Khadr was 15 in June 2002 when his radical father and ally of Osama bin Laden left him in the company of Al Qaeda fighters in southern Afghanistan. A month later, the Canadian youth was gravely wounded in a firefight with U.S. Special Forces and captured.
As the only surviving member of the militant cell that built bombs and observed coalition patrols near the city of Khost, Khadr was brought to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charged with murder, attempted murder, spying, conspiracy and material support for terrorism.
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