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.

As the trial of a former Guantanamo detainee proceeded peacefully in a New York courtroom today, U.S. military prosecutors in Cuba were reportedly scrambling to get Omar Khadr, the alleged child soldier on trial for war crimes at Gitmo, to plead guilty to murder. Plea negotiations are reportedly ongoing and his trial, set to resume Monday, has been postponed for a week.

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.

Things did not go well for Omar Khadr on his last day of pretrial hearings at Guantanamo Bay today.

Justice has been discarded in favor of political expediency at Guantanamo, as Judge Patrick Parrish has allowed Omar Khadr’s confessions to be admitted into evidence in his military commission trial. Included among the confessions is one obtained by convicted torturer Joshua Claus under threat of rape and/or death for the then 15 year old suspect.

The foreordained decision to include Omar Khadr’s confession, made after the fifteen-year-old boy was threatened with gang rape and murder, will now be admitted as evidence against him in the kangaroo court at Guantanamo Bay.

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.

On Tuesday, the Obama administration is scheduled to begin its first trial of a prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay. Omar Khadr was only 15 when he was captured in a firefight in 2002 with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Now 23, he’ll finally have his day in court. Only instead of an experienced federal court with a long history of trying terror suspects, Khadr will be tried in a military commission, created just last year. In the eight years since President George W. Bush created the first military commissions at Guantanamo, they have convicted only four terrorists – only two in contested trials. Regular federal courts in the United States, by contrast, have convicted more than 400 in the same time period.