RoadDave

Omar Khadr, the only Canadian-born detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been handed a 40-year sentence.  The backstory is long and controversial.  Khadr was 15 when he was engaged in a firefight with US troops in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002.  Evidence was presented that Khadr threw a grenade that killed Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer. 

We’re going to dodge around the child-soldier issue as Khadr met the UN definition of a child-soldier and despite that, has been tried as an adult. Canada is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  The US, is not.

We’re also going to dodge around the culpability Khadr might have, as I wasn’t there and neither were you.  There has been too much written by third party sources who weren’t there, have never spoken to the parties involved and who wouldn’t know which end of a weapon is the nice end and which is the unpleasant end.  Political axe grinders?  We can hear plenty from them.

Yes, Omar Khadr pled guilty to the charges last week.  He did it to get a deal.  The deal was for his eventual release and repatriation back to Canada, so he had to fib, otherwise he’d be in Gitmo for the next forty years.  Unlike nationals from Australia, the UK and other countries who were held in Gitmo by the US in the Evildoers of the Axis of Evil Doers Axis post 9/11 roundup, Canada has never asked the US to send Khadr back to Canada to face trial here.  The US has sent several dozen Gitmo Guests back to their homeland because the US knew they had no hope in hell of getting a conviction. 

Except with Omar Khadr, the US knew that our Prime Minister, Stephen “Call me Stephen” Harper, was (and still is) such a p-whipped Dubya-wannabe that Canada wouldn’t dare ask for repatriation.  Harper didn’t disappoint.

The US military panel of three female and four male US Military officers returned their decision this afternoon, saying, despite the plea deal brokered with the prosecution, that Khadr should get 40 years.  Khadr has already served eight years at Gitmo and the deal was for eight more.  Khadr will be eligible to apply for transfer back to Canada after one more year in the jug.

It would seem that the best the US Military Judicial System can do is to force a child soldier into a a bogus plea bargain to pay for US soldiers killed in action.  And don’t forget, someone has to pay for the “Mission Accomplished” banner and carrier landing on the TR.

Here’s the final, telling point:  Although more than 1,200 US troops have been killed in Afghanistan, only one detainee has been charged and put on trial.  That would be Omar Khadr.  The rest have walked.

An interesting little factoid dropped out of the ether yesterday, here.  For those too lazy to click on a link, here’s the short form:  It’s been a year since Ontario banned drivers from using cellphones and other handheld electronics behind the wheel, while driving.  Ottawa Police say they issue about 400 tickets a month to distracted drivers who often appear impaired, swerving across lanes, braking oddly, or sometimes even swerving into oncoming traffic.

Let’s see, some math here:  400 tickets, divided by 30 days is 13+ tickets a day, more or less.

Some other math, again simple math for those like me who are numerically intolerant:  30 miles per hour is the same as 44 feet per second. Divide by 3, as one-third of a second is the median reaction time of an attentive driver reacting to something while driving.  Not braking, but just seeing it and having the brain go Oh, perhaps I should stop before I run over that nun. That would be about 14 feet in round numbers.  Now add another 2.5 seconds to move the feet, apply the brakes and come to a rapid, but not panic, stop.  44 times 2.5, plus 14 gives us 124 feet, or just around 42 yards. 

An obvious need, an attentive driver, in a non-panic, buried-in-the-ABS-stop of a car going 30 miles per hour takes just under a half a football field to accomplish.

Since most people don’t drive 30 miles per hour in the city, except during rush hour, you can ramp up the math yourself.  45 miles per hour is 66 feet per second, 60 miles per hour is 88 feet per second and so on.

Now, add an extra two seconds to the reaction time, as the attentive driver is fiddling with his or her cellphone, trying to tweet that he’s got a Chicken Double Down from KFC that he’s almost finished eating.  Scratch that, add another four seconds to reaction time.  Maybe five or six seconds. 

We are now out into the realm of our mythical Nun, (Sister Mary Ignacio of Our Lady Of Perpetual Motion) not only being run over by one car, but quite possibly the other cars following, plowing into the first car, after clipping Sister Mary’s body a second, third or fourth time

The simple math of a known constant (44 feet per second equals 30 miles per hour) and a clueless hump trying to text, call or tweet on a cellphone has done for Sister Mary.  Odds are that our clueless hump will post to his Facebook that he’s in an ambulance because the fecal-matter for brains behind him ran into the back of his stopped car, after he inadvertently had a nun jump off the sidewalk, intent on martyrdom and got slammed into by an idiot on a cellphone in a truck and now he’s got whiplash.

To be concise about it, do not use your cellphone for anything while you are driving your car.  That means texting, posting, answering email, answering a call, listening to voice mail or even changing the wallpaper on your screen.  Nothing. 

Is that really so hard to understand? 

There’s no way around it, except to say that the former commander of Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Trenton, Col. Russell Williams is a very unwell individual.  The Crown (the DA in Americanese) has listed the particulars of the 88 charges that Williams has pled guilty to and the particulars are revolting. 

If you feel obligated here’s the link, but we’ll caution you now, the specifics are disturbing in so many ways at so deep a level that we’re not sure we ever want to read them again.  If you don’t get into the particulars, you can still keep up with the posting, as we’re not really into the specifics of his crimes.

The question, and this posting, is more about the Monsters Among Us.  There have always been, for the lack of a better term, Monsters in our society.  One could argue that Vlad The Impaler, or Vlad Dracula, was one of the first recorded, historical Monsters, whose predilection for over-the-top savagery were recorded for all time.  Even deducting half for distortion through the lens of oral history and various colourations of friends or foes recording events, Vlad Dracula was a Monster. 

The list can include participants in the Crusades, various wars, police actions, insurrections, invasions, political machinations, purges, pogroms and punishments, meted out since we started recording history.  Usually that list of Monsters includes those who are called war criminals, or who commit crimes against humanity.  

Then there are the lone Monsters, like Ed Gein, Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer.  The ones who slip through the cracks, who when caught, we see their neighbour on TV saying “He was a quiet guy who kept to himself, but he was always friendly.”  Those are the real Monsters who elicit our real fear because they have lived among us, hiding in plain sight.

We can’t actually know all the reasons someone becomes a Monster.  Even though the best minds in psychiatry have studied their crimes, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, we still come up without a good answer. 

Straight up crazies, we can figure out:  Voices in their head said kill Brian because the particular perpetrator had serious neurochemical imbalances that produced the craziness that let someone step over that line from merely hearing voices to acting on the things the voices were saying.  We’re not going to condemn the legitimately unwell, as it isn’t actually their fault.  The Monsters though?

The test is; does the perpetrator know what they are doing is wrong?  Are they consciously breaking significant societal taboos because they want to, need to, or like to?  Another aspect of the Monster test is their attitude to their actions:  Is it a game of Catch me if you can, with the highest possible stakes?  That was a goodly piece of Ted Bundy:  He thought he was smarter than everyone else, especially the police. 

Here’s where things get murky.  What is the philosophical difference between someone who kills people for the power dynamic thrill of taking a life and someone who kills people because their victims are worthless and the killer has been assured that he will get a reward in the afterlife?  One is a thrill-seeker and one is a religious zealot.  Both are killers.  One ran a pig farm in British Columbia and one flew a plane full of passengers into the World Trade Center.  Is the motivation, or the timeline a defining factor in making the determination of a Monster?

We do know that with our highly interconnected, hypernews-immersed society, we hear about the Monsters faster, with more detail and more depth than we want.  This is a price we pay for being more connected. 

We’ll postulate a theory here:  The percentage of Monsters through time is a constant number per capita, from hunter-gatherer days in the trees, to today.  There have always been that one out of several hundred thousand who, to use a colloquialism; “Just ain’t right.” 

Col. Russell Williams looks like he’s going to join that list.