Josh Gerstein provides Lindsey Graham a soap box to complain that his efforts to craft a grand compromise with the Administration on Gitmo stalled in May.

The Administration has now realized trying a Canadian accused of murder for killing someone in an active battlefield as a teenager exposes the Gitmo show trials as a kangaroo court. But they don’t know whether they have the authority to intervene to stop it.

There’s still a kangaroo stench around the military commissions.

So the guy running the Kangaroo Court for this child soldier has decided that rape threats do not constitute a threat of severe pain or suffering.

Mind you, as I alluded to here and made explicit by Parrish’s ruling, Gitmo rules say specifically you can use information so long as the information itself was not collected using torture. Which is why Parrish is so careful to argue that Khadr’s confessions have nothing to do with that threat of severe pain or suffering that Parrish seems to think is no big deal, because then everything’s admissible!

Just as soon as Omar Khadr’s trial began, it’s stopped; Khadr’s lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapsed in the courthouse late yesterday. The military commission is now recessed for thirty days; does the recess help or hinder the process?

And Omar Khadr, who has been held for a third of his life, has another month gone.

Best as I can tell, the fake plea bargain Omar Khadr was offered–in which he would be sentenced publicly, but in which there was a secret agreement that he would serve just a fraction of that time–is what happened to Osama bin Laden cook Ibrahim al Qosi today. After making great show of picking a jury and directing them they could sentence Qosi to between 12 and 15 years, the military commission sentenced al Qosi to 14 years.

But everyone knows that 14 year sentence doesn’t represent Qosi’s real sentence. Instead, he is reported to be serving 2 more years–though there is a bit of a dispute because his plea promised he’d serve his time in communal quarters even though DOD regulations prohibit that.

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.

You’ll recall that DOD banned Carol Rosenberg and three other key Gitmo journalists when they published Claus’ name–even though one of them, Michelle Shepherd, had published an on-the-record interview with him in the past. Yet now DOD says–on the eve of the Khadr trial–that it’s okay to publish his name? And as justification, they say his own actions, rather than the public nature of his name, means publishing it does not violate ground rules? Really?

Abdullah Khadr, like his brother Omar, said he made the confession only after suffering from abuse.