Yesterday, 24-year-old Canadian citizen Omar Khadr pleaded guilty to terrorism related charges during his military tribunal hearing at Guantanamo Bay. Khadr admitted to throwing a grenade on an Afghanistan battlefield that killed an American soldier in 2002 and planting numerous roadside bombs. Khadr had been reluctant to admit guilt, but his Canadian lawyer, speaking with the CBC’s As It Happens last night, explained the situation Khadr faced:

DENNIS EDNY: He’s agreed to accept this deal because when he looks at the alternatives and the alternatives are that he’s in a military process…that has been condemned by military prosecutors themselves who say that it is designed to make findings of guilt. He faced the potential of life in prison under this system here because the jury is hand picked, the judge is hand picked, the prosecution is hand picked and the military defense is hand picked. And then what I think really capped it all off was, much of the evidence against Omar are statements that he made while being abused and tortured and under duress. So the cards were stacked.

Indeed, Khadr was both mentally and physically abused at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, where he was first interrogated, and at Gitmo. Those statements he made under duress were deemed admissible in court. Moreover, the New York Times notes that Khadr’s prosecution was “unusual” not only because child soldiers are normally not prosecuted (Khadr was 15 years old when the U.S. military apprehended him), but also because the main charge against him was killing a soldier on the battlefield, an action, again, that is not traditionally prosecuted. Thus, the U.S. military took great pains (see the “Jurisdiction” section of Khadr’s Stipulation of Fact) to make the case that Khadr lacked military immunity. One reason the military cited was the fact that Khadr wore no national military uniform. The Times reports the Obama administration’s shocking reaction to this conundrum:

The uniform issue also led to a scramble by the Obama legal team to rewrite commission rules on the eve of a hearing for Mr. Khadr. Because Central Intelligence Agency drone operators also kill while not wearing uniforms, the team rewrote the rules to downgrade “murder in violation of the laws of war” to a domestic law offense from a war crime to avoid seeming to implicitly concede that the C.I.A. is committing war crimes.

During his CBC interview, Edny further explained the bizarre circumstances surrounding Khadr’s plea:

EDNY: In court today, they added two more charges that we’d never heard of and it seems to be that he is responsible for everybody that got injured or killed in that fight in the compound with the Taliban. [...] These charges that Omar faces are unknown under the laws of war. The Americans made them up in order to justify detaining people who didn’t wear a uniform in the battlefields of Afghanistan and I’ve often said over the years, can someone tell me what uniform the Northern Alliance was wearing when it joined the Americans in attacking the Taliban? So it’s all smoke and mirrors here.

Listen to Edny’s interview with the CBC:

Under the terms of the agreement, Khadr will serve one more year in detention in Guantanamo Bay and then be repatriated to Canada to serve the remaining seven years.

A number of legal scholars questioned the legitimacy of Khadr’s proceedings. “The conviction of this child soldier for non-existent war crimes is a disgraceful travesty and a stain on America’s reputation,” said former Gitmo defense lawyer David Frakt, who added that the plea “saved the administration from the unseemly spectacle of a trial” and that the U.S. will “still go down in history as the first civilised nation to prosecute a child soldier as a war criminal.” Stanford Law lecturer Chip Pitts said, “This plea bargain shouldn’t be taken as indication of the legitimacy of the irredeemably tainted military commissions.”

“I don’t know how anyone who cares about the integrity and moral standing of the United States can absorb the full details of this case and not be profoundly ashamed,” writes the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. “To prosecute a child soldier, already nearly killed in battle, tortured and abused in custody, and to imprison him for this length of time and even now, convict him of charges for which there is next to no proof but his own coerced confessions…well, words fail.”

In an interview with Univision, senatorial candidate and son of Cuban immigrants, Marco Rubio (R-FL) told the Spanish language network that he doesn’t like to use the term “illegal” and prefers “undocumented” when talking about immigrants in the U.S. without papers:

UNIVISION: Is there a difference between an illegal and an undocumented?

RUBIO: Well “illegal” is a term that I don’t like to use, though it is a violation of the law to enter the U.S. with documents. They’re humans. I prefer to talk about the issue as “undocumented” because they are people who don’t have documents that follow the law.

Watch the Univision video and past clips of Rubio’s immigration remarks [In English and Spanish]:

I couldn’t find any clips in which Rubio ever employed the term “undocumented.” To his credit, in recent months, he has talked about undocumented immigrants as “people who come to the U.S. illegally.” However, when he was fighting a tough primary in which he tried to portray his opponent, Gov. Charlie Crist, as soft on immigration, Rubio didn’t hesitate to use the term “illegal immigrant”:

In February, Rubio opted to use “illegal immigrants” when arguing that undocumented immigrants should be excluded from the census, saying:

“Gov. Crist’s position to include illegal immigrants in this count would dilute the voting power of every American citizen. It would actually incentivize politicians to perpetuate our broken immigration system by rewarding states with large illegal immigrant populations with a louder voice in Washington.”

When he “delivered a six-minute discourse on immigration policy” back in November in which he slammed Ronald Reagan’s support of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), Rubio stated:

“There were people trying to enter the country legally, who had done the paperwork, who were here legally, who were going through the process, who claimed, all of a sudden, ‘No, no no no , I’m illegal.’ Because it was easier to do the amnesty program than it was to do the legal process.”

Rubio also appears to have no problem with the fact that the term regularly appears on his website:

“Crist’s only real Social Security plan is to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants but that has actually been debunked as an idea that would lead to Social Security’s bankruptcy sooner rather than later.”

“Marco believes that our nation’s immigration policy should consist of border enforcement, securing the border, fixing the visa process and ensuring that no law extends amnesty to illegal immigrants.”

Many in the Latino and immigrant communities find the term “illegal immigrant” offensive because it “qualifies an entire person, rather than an act.”

This past weekend Rubio stated on CNN’s State of the Union that he supports fixing the legal immigration system so that “people in this country without documents” can go back to their home countries and reenter the country legally. In his interview with Univision, Rubio explained that he supports modernizing the immigration system so that undocumented immigrants can enter the U.S. through a process that works, but didn’t mention anything about going back to their “homeland.” You can watch the full interview here.