President Obama's promise to shut the Guantánamo Bay detention facility has come back to haunt him. Not only is the facility still open long past the January 2010 deadline that Obama set for closing it, but this week saw the first steps in the trial of its youngest and most controversial inmate. Omar Khadr, who has been held at the facility for seven years, faces a maximum life sentence for allegedly killing a U.S. soldier during a battle in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old.

If Khadr is convicted by a jury composed of U.S. military officers, he will be the first person convicted of war crimes committed as a child anywhere in the world since World War II,