I have spent today reading a lot of tough talk on the blogs about how Khadr should be “waterboarded until he stops crying” and such. I wonder if those same hawks could tell me how they would have turned out if they’d been told — literally, since the day they were born — about the necessity of jihad and the beauty of martyrdom; if, since early days, they’d been propagandized into believing that the West was waging a genocidal war against Muslims; and that military resistance was the only path of survival. Are we to expect some sort of inborn moral sense to activate — to tell us that everything being told to us by our own parents is wrong — even before one is old enough to shave?

I know about 20,000 former child soldiers in Sierra Leone who could tell you the answer to that question. And unlike Khadr, not one of them stands accused of “Violation of the Law of War.”
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