Thank you for your question.
To answer your second question first, understand what the military commission process is designed to do. It is designed to produce criminal convictions using evidence that the United States has gathered through so-called enhanced interrogation techniques in the war on terror, evidence that does not meet the traditional standards of reliability that we require for criminal prosecutions in the regular courts of the United States, or in courts martial for that matter. So these commissions exist to essentially allow the government to obtain these convictions against this very limited class of defendants, using this evidence in the special circumstances of Guantánamo Bay and the war on terror.
Given the nature of these proceedings, given the very prejudicial nature of the evidence that I anticipate will be introduced against Omar at trial, and given the fact that the commission process again, unlike other juvenile justice proceedings, unlike the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals, does not take Omar's age into account at all, I believe he will be convicted and I believe he will receive an adult sentence. So even though there's almost no real evidence to support the proposition that Omar actually threw a hand grenade in July 2002 that killed a U.S. soldier—on what we call a principle theory, and I can explain that in some depth where I can—Omar will probably nonetheless be convicted of murder by a military commission for little more than having survived the firefight.
Given that, and again given the prejudicial nature of these proceedings, I believe he will receive a life sentence or something very close to it.
As to your first question, I agree with you entirely. As I said during my remarks, I think what the protocol stands for is the proposition that children who are unlawfully exploited by our enemies and used as tools, really, in combat should be regarded as victims of our enemies and not as part of our enemies. What's very interesting is that the Child Soldier Protocol, the treaty to which the United States and Canada are both parties—and I should point out that Canada was the first country to ratify the protocol, that's how seriously this country takes its commitment to these issues—essentially recognizes this proposition, and it's very up to date. In fact, the protocol doesn't only address children unlawfully recruited or exploited by state armed forces, it even talks about children unlawfully recruited and exploited by non-state actors, such as al-Qaeda. So it's specifically designed to address the issue before us, which is, in the U.S. government's view, a war with a non-state armed force that has unlawfully recruited and employed a child, and the protocol mandates that Omar Khadr, as such a person, again be regarded essentially as a victim and afforded opportunities for rehabilitation and recovery. It's simply beyond dispute that the United States government has not complied with the protocol in its treatment of Omar.