GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A military judge on Monday dismissed terrorism-related charges against a prisoner charged with killing an American soldier in Afghanistan, in a stunning reversal for the Bush administration’s attempts to try Guantanamo detainees in military court.

The chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, said the ruling in the case of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system set up last year by Congress and President Bush after the Supreme Court threw out the previous system.

But Omar Khadr, who was 15 when he was captured after a deadly firefight in Afghanistan and who is now 20, will remain at the remote U.S. military base along with some 380 other men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, said he had no choice but to throw the Khadr case out because he had been classified as an “enemy combatant” by a military panel years earlier - and not as an “alien unlawful enemy combatant.”

The Military Commissions Act, signed by Bush last year, specifically says that only those classified as “unlawful” enemy combatants can face war trials here, Brownback noted during the arraignment in a hilltop courtroom on this U.S. military base.

Sullivan said the dismissal of Khadr case has “huge” impact because none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an “unlawful” enemy combatant.

“It is not just a technicality - it’s the latest demonstration that this newest system just does not work,” Sullivan told journalists. “It is a system of justice that does not comport with American values.”

Sullivan said the judge hearing the case of the only other Guantanamo detainee currently charged with crimes is not bound by Brownback’s ruling but that he expected the judge would make the same decision.

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