Forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner is interviewed by a Candian newspaper and engages in character assassination in order to make Omar Khadr look like an unrepentant evil terrorist, comparable to Osama bin Laden. Dr. Welner bases this on an evaluation of Mr. Khadr in custody at Guantanamo. The timing of the interview is suspect, as negotiations over a possible plea bargain for the former child “soldier” are ongoing.

Debunking the most recent criticism of the U.S. justice system for terrorism trials.

Lawyers made opening statements Tuesday as the trial began in earnest for the first former Guantanamo detainee transferred to U.S. soil. While the government portrayed the slight, baby-faced 36-year-old as a vicious al Qaeda murderer who helped plan two US embassy bombings that killed 224 people, the defense told a very different story. Although not contesting much of the evidence the government plans to present — about the bombings themselves, its destructiveness and their innocent victims — defense lawyers argue that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was a hapless young Tanzanian duped into helping his powerful childhood friends who, unbeknownst to him, were al Qaeda killers.

On Wednesday, to the surprise of some spectators in the courtroom, a U.S. federal judge did the right thing: he followed the law.

When Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was first transferred to New York from Guantanamo Bay last year, House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio called it “the first step in the Democrats’ plan to import terrorists into America.”

I’ll agree with Sen. Lindsey Graham on one thing: “Americans still wait for justice.” That’s the headline of a column he wrote that ran in the SunNews and other South Carolina newspapers on Monday, lamenting that the U.S. government still hasn’t put the plotters of the September 11 terrorist attacks on trial. But Graham’s explanation for why we haven’t yet seen justice is actually backwards.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that administration officials are “alarmed” by the military commission case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen seized as a 15-year-old by U.S. forces in Afghanistan who’s now spent a third of his life in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Trying an alleged child soldier based largely on confessions he made after being threatened with gang-rape and murder is not the case the Obama administration had hoped to showcase in its first military commission trial.

But the argument in a new paper published today by Loyola Law School professor David Glazier should give the administration even more cause for alarm. Glazier, an expert on international law and the laws of armed conflict, argues that the military commission trial of Omar Khadr is itself a war crime.

The New York Times today highlights a new report released by ProPublica and the National Law Journal concluding that torture and “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by the Bush Administration and used on suspected terrorists has made it impossible to bring many of those alleged terrorists to justice.

Trying 15-year-old child soldier Omar Khadr for murder, the planned sentence life imprisonment, absurd and obscene on so many levels.

Pretrial hearings in the case of Omar Khadr today were dominated by arguments over whether his “confessions” to interrogators should be suppressed due to alleged abuse, and what other evidence should be admitted at trial. Khadr’s lawyer argued that all of his statements about what he did should not be admissible at trial because his lead interrogator at Bagram threatened him with gang rape, and possibly with death, thereby tainting his perspective of all of the interrogators asking him questions afterwards.