GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A military judge here dismissed the war crimes charges against a Canadian detainee today, saying there was a flaw in the procedure the military has used to file such charges against Guantánamo detainees. The ruling in the case of the Canadian, Omar Khadr, is likely to stall the military’s war crimes prosecutions here. Critics of the prosecutions immediately called for Congress to reexamine the system it set up last year for military commissions to try detainees. The military judge, Col. Peter E. Brownback III of the Army, said that Congress authorized the tribunals to try only those detainees who had been determined to be unlawful enemy combatants. But the military authorities here, he said, have determined only that Mr. Khadr was an enemy combatant, without making the added determination that his participation was ‘unlawful.’ Military lawyers here said the same flaw would affect every other potential war crimes case here. The ruling, the latest in a history of legal setbacks for the government’s effort to bring war-crimes charges against detainees, appeared to raise far-reaching questions, because it involved central principles of detention procedures. Under directives from President Bush and senior Defense Department […]

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