First Gitmo trial under Obama poses tough test for his 'swift and 'certain justice' pledge

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Politico:

First Gitmo trial under Obama poses tough test for his 'swift and 'certain justice' pledge

By JOSH GERSTEIN | 7/24/10 7:04 AM EDT


When the first military commission trial of Barack Obama’s presidency gets underway in a few weeks at Guantanamo Bay, the man in the dock won’t be the mastermind of 9/11 or some other capo in the Al Qaeda hierarchy.

Instead, it’s likely to be a prisoner first captured at age 15 — and held at Gitmo for nearly eight years, after a firefight in Afghanistan in which an American Army medic was killed and another U.S. soldier lost an eye.

The war-crimes trial of Omar Khadr, now 23, would be the test case for a process that Obama has promised will restore the legitimacy of military trials and prove their ability to deliver “swift and certain justice.”

But as it became clearer in recent days that Khadr’s trial was likely to go first, an unusual consensus has emerged among some military commission backers and opponents that the Canadian-born man’s case is a poor one to vindicate the new system and Obama’s reforms.

Critics of the move say that trying someone first picked up as a juvenile — who contends he was tortured and threatened with rape – is hardly the new face to the world Obama wanted to show when he pledged to break with the Bush administration’s handling of Gitmo and terror trials.

“They couldn’t have chosen a worse case to go forward with. There’s so much wrong with Khadr’s case, it’s difficult to know where to begin,” said commission critic Tom Parker of Amnesty International. “It looks strange. It’s embarrassing and it’s going to continue to be embarrassing. …Nobody around the world is going to look at this re-jiggered military commission and say, ‘It looks fantastic.’ ”

“Based on my conversations with various officials, there are people in the military who don’t think it was a good thing to bring this case first, not because they think he’s innocent….The problem is the optics of the whole thing,” said Tom Joscelyn of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a backer of the military commissions process.

“His cause has been taken up by human rights organizations and others trying to turn him into a martyr.”

Those concerns could explain why, according to legal sources, the Obama administration has been eager to avert the trial by striking a plea deal with Khadr that could involve him serving some additional prison time, perhaps in Canada. At a hearing this month, Khadr said he’d rejected a deal that involved him serving an additional five years. He also tried to dismiss his lawyers, said he planned to boycott what he called a “sham process” and laid out a narrative that portrayed the United States as the latest in a series of actors who have tried to take advantage of his youth.