Glenn Greenwald tweeted earlier about the oddness of the charges against Canadian national and Gitmo detainee Omar Khadr, who is accused of throwing the grenade the killed U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, when Khadr was 15. Aside from the obvious moral issues with trying someone for an alleged crime committed on a battlefield when they weren't old enough to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or consent to sex in the United States, there's the additional weirdness of trying the killing as a "war crime." Human-rights groups say no one has ever before been tried for a war crime merely for the act of killing the other side's soldiers in combat, but the government maintains that Khadr is an "unprivileged enemy belligerent," so the charge is appropriate.
It's a really weird argument. By trying Khadr in a military commission, they're essentially making him a soldier, but they're saying the reason his alleged killing of Speer was a war crime is because he's not a soldier. If Khadr killed Speer, that's certainly a crime. But a war crime?
Of course the other crime Khadr stands accused of, material support for terrorism, based on allegations that Khadr set landmines meant for U.S. soldiers, is also generally considered a crime-crime not a war crime. In fact, prior convictions based on those charges may have put the entire military-commissions system in danger.
