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Welcome Back Khadr?Obama's Canada trip is a perfect opportunity to repatriate Gitmo's youngest detainee.

By Dahlia LithwickPosted Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009, at 7:16 PM ET

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The principal argument for keeping Khadr in the U.S. military justice system seems to be that his alleged crimes were committed against Americans and the alleged evidence has been amassed by Americans, and thus he should be tried by Americans. But the case against Khadr has been flimsy at the best of times and has deteriorated in the years since his capture, including doubt cast by the Defense Department itself on whether he was even the guy who threw the grenade. The progression of the case against Khadr has been so loopy that the military court's presiding officer, Col. Peter C. Brownback, tossed out all the charges against him in 2007, a decision that was quickly reversed by a hastily manufactured "appeals court." Then, last summer, when Brownback threatened to suspend the whole hearing if prosecutors failed to turn over records concerning Khadr's treatment, Brownback was unceremoniously dumped off the case.

Then there's the fact that Khadr claims to have confessed under torture. Videos of him weeping during an interrogation surfaced last year and served only to remind the world that he was a teenager confined at Guantanamo among "the worst of the worst." Khadr was allegedly shackled in stress positions until he urinated on himself, then covered with pine solvent and used as a "human mop" to clean his own urine. He was beaten, nearly suffocated, beset by attack dogs, and threatened with rape. In May 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in Canada v. Khadr that the detention of Khadr at Guantanamo Bay "constituted a clear violation of fundamental human rights protected by international law."

Khadr isn't just a poster boy for closing Gitmo; he's a poster boy for the prisoner abuse of children there. If you haven't yet read the new testimony of Army Spc. Brandon Neely about the sexual and physical sadism that went on at Gitmo, it's worth your time. It's not enough for the United States to renounce torture, although that's a good start. We need to start to make amends for the fact that children in our custody were tortured.

And that's the final and most important point here. Khadr was never treated in accordance with the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which hold that when a signatory captures juveniles on the battlefield, it must work to rehabilitate them, even when they are nasty brats. Special accommodations are required for their incarceration and treatment. But the Bush administration always took the position—and Stephen Harper always agreed—that Khadr was not a child soldier. Of course, Khadr was the very definition of a child soldier, radicalized by his bat-shit family at a young age and sent to training camps before he even had facial hair. If Obama wants to send the signal that international statutes and treaties have meaning in this country, even when that's not convenient, admitting that Khadr was not treated in accordance with those treaties is critically important.

This week's obscure legal parlor game involves complicated guessing at which aspects of the Bush war on terror Obama will adopt and which he will renounce. My own suspicion is that Obama is willing to go quite far to maintain executive branch secrecy and flexibility while putting the greatest possible distance between himself and his predecessor's overzealousness and sometimes gratuitous cruelty. That's why sending Khadr home for the Canadians to deal with is a no-brainer. The Obama administration gets to keep its secrets and still respect international agreements. He gets to evince trust in his allies while unloading an international-relations headache. And he can, in one neat diplomatic move, concede that enormous mistakes were made at Gitmo while leaving it to others to fix them.