Military judge scraps Khadr charge

WASHINGTON, June 4 (UPI) -- The U.S. ruling at Guantanamo Bay Monday can be interpreted as a semantic problem, a miscarriage of justice or a victory for human rights.

A U.S. military judge threw out the charges against Canadian Omar Khadr during a military commission, the trials specially created to prosecute detainees captured in the "global war on terror."

After the U.S. Supreme Court found the original military commission system created by the White House unconstitutional, Congress last year passed a slightly different version into law so the trials could go ahead.

To satisfy a separate concern of the Supreme Court, the U.S. Department of Defense adopted a formal hearing process to determine the status of detainees, weighing the evidence collected when they were captured or handed over by others.

Roughly 40 of the detainees who faced the combatant status review tribunals and were determined to be innocent. Some 380 Guantanamo prisoners are considered "enemy combatants."

The problem is the 2006 law that enshrined the military commissions specifies the trials are to be used to prosecute "alien unlawful enemy combatants." The combatant status review tribunal only dubs prisoners "enemy combatants."

However, in doctrine written in 2005 but not yet approved, the Pentagon defined an enemy combatant as inherently "unlawful."

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday said the ruling shows the military commission process is "fundamentally flawed."

"It is long past time that war crimes trials are shifted to ordinary courts martial or civilian courts. The civilian courts in the United States have dealt successfully with terrorism prosecutions over the last five years," Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, said in a statement.