Omar Khadr, 24, a Canadian citizen, admitted to a military judge that he threw a grenade that killed an American soldier during a July 2002 firefight and that he had planted 10 roadside bombs for Al Qaeda. Mr. Khadr, born in Toronto, was 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan.
In exchange for pleading guilty to five charges — including murder in violation of the law of war, supporting terrorism, and spying — Mr. Khadr was spared the risk of a life sentence. A panel of seven military officers will now decide how long his prison sentence will be.
But his plea agreement is believed to cap the time at eight years, on top of the eight he has already been in custody. In addition, the United States has promised to support his eventual application to transfer to Canadian custody after he serves at least one more year in Guantánamo.
Mr. Khadr’s decision to plead guilty was a turnabout, since last summer he vowed in open court that he would never accept such an arrangement on the grounds that doing so would allow the United States government to save face. He contended that he was coerced by elder relatives into working with Al Qaeda and was not at fault.
The deal to avert a trial of Mr. Khadr represents a breakthrough for the Obama administration’s legal team, which had been dismayed that his case was to become the inaugural run of a new-look military commissions system — undermining their efforts to rebrand the tribunals in the eyes of the world as a fair and just forum for prosecuting terrorism suspects.
The plea deal followed a flurry of complex negotiations, including a side deal between the United States and Canada. Reached on Saturday, it says that the Canadian government will treat the results of a military commission trial in the same way as a regular civilian court’s, under a prisoner transfer treaty.
It remains unclear, however, whether the government of the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, which has declined to seek Mr. Khadr’s repatriation, would accept any bid by Mr. Khadr to serve out the remainder of his sentence in Canada.
The commission system was set up by former President George W. Bush in November 2001, and has long been contentious. The Supreme Court struck down one version of the system in 2006, and it has resulted in only a handful of convictions.
President Obama had campaigned for the White House as a critic of the Bush administration’s version of military commissions. One of his first acts after taking office was to halt all the prosecutions then underway at the American military base in Cuba — including the case against Mr. Khadr.
But Mr. Obama and his advisors later decided that it was necessary to keep a form of the tribunals if some detainees were to receive any trial at all. The commission rules provided greater flexibility than civilian court about the admission of certain evidence, like hearsay and material gathered from the battlefield.
The administration spent months working with Congress to set up new commission rules that provide greater protections to defendants. It then restarted the trials in November 2009, hoping that the overhaul would change their global image as a second-class justice system. Some allies have refused to provide crucial evidence or witnesses for use in the tribunals,.
Still, no one intended Mr. Khadr’s case to become the first trial under the revamped system, complicating efforts to showcase the reforms. But in August, a Sudanese detainee’s trial was averted when the man pled guilty, and Mr. Khadr’s was next in line.
Mr. Khadr, who comes from a family with links to al Qaeda, was a teenager in the summer of 2002 when he was found, heavily wounded, at a Qaeda compound in Afghanistan that had been attacked by United States troops.
A grenade blast in that firefight killed an Army sergeant, Christopher Speer. American investigators later concluded that Mr. Khadr probably threw the grenade, and a videotape found the compound was said to show Mr. Khadr helping to make and plant roadside bombs.
But several factors made the effort to prosecute Mr. Khadr for war crimes unusual.
The centerpiece of the charges against him was not a conventional terrorism offense — the targeting of civilians — but the killing of an enemy in combat. Usually in war, battlefield killing is not prosecuted. But the United States contended that Mr. Khadr lacked the privilege of battlefield immunity because he wore no uniform, among other requirements of the laws of war.
The uniform issue also led to a scramble by the Obama legal team to rewrite commission rules on the eve of a pretrial hearing for Mr. Khadr. Because Central Intelligence Agency drone operators also kill while not wearing uniforms, they rewrote the rules to downgrade murder from a war crime to a domestic law offense.
Moreover, child soldiers are almost never prosecuted for war crimes. That meant that the coverage of Mr. Khadr’s case around the world was dominated by persistent questions about whether the case was appropriate.
On Monday, for example, Human Rights Watch said the United States “should never have pursued the case” because convicting someone of war crimes for actions taken as a juvenile for the first time since World War II “sets a terrible precedent.”
The Khadr plea deal means that the first commission trial in the Obama era is likely to instead be the prosecution of Noor Uthman Mohammed, a Sudanese man captured at a suspected Qaeda safehouse in Pakistan in 2002.
He is accused of being an important Qaeda figure who ran a terrorist training camp, was a Taliban unit commander, and was planning to participate in a terrorist operation against Israel. His trial is scheduled for February 2011.
