Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
Except and they'll argue that Khadr was not a soldier, he was a illegal combatant so what he did was tantamount to murder.
the child soldier thing and everything else might be fairly irrelevant in a civil suit.
He was equivalent to a gang member hucking a hand grenade at a cop and his actions made him directly responsible for the death of Speer and the wounds to Morris.
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You may have posted this before I edited my post. I agree. And I'm not saying that such an argument has no merit. But I find it problematic for a number of reasons. First, traditionally international law only distinguished between "combatants" and "civilians". The idea of an "unlawful combatant" is a recent phenomenon and was of course unilaterally produced by state actors in the 21st century who increasingly found themselves embroiled in conflicts with non-state actors.
One man's unlawful combatant is another man's freedom fighter and all of that (for example, see Syria).