The appearance of children on the battlefield is nothing new. Nor is the reality that a significant percentage of the people who take part in uprisings in any given part of the world are teenagers. In the west, most of us have been shocked at some point by pictures of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Somalia or Rwanda carrying AK-47s. Or by videos of the intifada or violence in Lebanon, videos in which parents grieve over sons shot by security forces cracking down on rock-throwers and the makers of Molotov cocktails. But that shock fades, because the images are so foreign, too grotesque; to absorb them fully would take a kind of emotional exercise that most people watching the news aren’t willing to undertake. In like fashion, if we give thought to the effect of the “war on drugs” on American youth, particularly the youth of our cities, the thought passes soon after we turn off the TV and go back to paying our bills or putting our own kids to bed. This is America, and we fool ourselves with brief thoughts of rehabilitation and move on, in the hopeful ignorance that our society is doing the right thing.

But now we are faced with something different. Lawyers for Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr have released excerpts from an interrogation video made in 2003. Omar Khadr is a Canadian citizen captured “on the battlefield” in 2002. He was 15 then, and he has been held at Guantanamo Bay ever since. Six years later, the U.S. has brought charges against him.

This should give us pause. Let us be clear: the Bush administration claims the unfettered authority to capture, charge, and detain indefinitely minors captured overseas.

In the 10 minutes of video released by Khadr’s lawyers, a Canadian agent interrogates the teenager in a small room. You can see the video and read about it here. The then-16 year old Khadr breaks down when he realizes that the agent is not there to help him, but to assist Americans in extracting information from him. Khadr speaks accentless English, and in many ways, the video appears to be like the interrogation of any American teenager for any violent crime.

But this interrogation is different, because Omar Khadr’s situation is nearly unique. This is not a criminal case in which a juvenile faces an imminent court hearing and the possibility of a finite sentence. Khadr has been held for six years and only now faces charges that could put him away until he dies. He has been held for 1/3 of his life without any sense of when or how he would ever be released, knowing that the greatest power in the world could hold him indefinitely. Nor is this case identical to the other military commission trials pending in Guantanamo Bay; Omar Khadr was a minor when captured. Of all the people taken prisoner “on the battlefield” and sent to Guantanamo Bay, eight were juveniles. Six were released. Two remain, and Omar Khadr has been charged first.

To me, beyond the constitutional issues, the evidentiary issues, the military issues, there is a philosophical question: how do we differentiate between the treatment of child soldiers and adult ones? When does a child become an adult? At what age does the indefinite detention of an individual become too onerous to tolerate? Fifteen must be very close to that line. What if Khadr had been 14? Would you want him tried as an adult? What if he had been 13? Twelve? Would you be outraged if George Bush claimed the authority to try an eleven year old for war crimes?

I am not trying to say anything about the merits of the case against Omar Khadr. He may well have taken part in armed action against U.S. soldiers. As a former member of the military myself, I have no qualms about the need to defend ourselves against whomever we encounter in armed combat. But we must make that mental shift from the scenario of someone pointing a gun at us to the point after we have pacified and detained that person. The customs of war, so long as man has held a club, sword, or gun, have made distinctions between combatants and detainees. And societies, in their wisdom, treat adult wrong-doers differently than youths.

The need for those distinctions has not faded. In fact, we face a moment when we must, as a society, take a fresh look at those questions. And perhaps Americans will decide that 15 is old enough to face indefinite detention and a military trial for taking part in actions against our troops (although I doubt it). But if we do not ask these questions and if we do not renew our commitment to basic principles of justice now, it will be too easy to let that commitment slip away. We won’t notice the next time a 14 year old or a 13 year old is captured. Maybe we won’t get outraged if a 16 year old girl is rendered to a foreign country for interrogation. Maybe we won’t notice when that teenager is an American citizen. There may not be a video tape to remind us.