GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A military judge on Tuesday postponed next week's trial of Canadian captive Omar Khadr, easing pressure on the new White House to make a swift decision on military commissions.

Army Col. Patrick Parrish announced the delay at a pretrial hearing Tuesday morning at the war court, which quit for the day to let military staff watch President Barack Obama take the oath of office. Hearings at both commissions courtrooms were scheduled to resume Wednesday.

The change of administration passed with little fanfare at this remote U.S. Navy base, which has drawn international condemnation as a key outpost of Bush administration war-on-terror detention policy.

At the main base cafeteria, troops chattered throughout their meatloaf lunch, even as every television in the galley was tuned to the transfer of power.

The din did not diminish even as Obama declared America ``a nation at war.''

APPLAUSE

In a rare display of emotion, Navy Petty Officer Patrick Thompson applauded after Obama took the oath, then watched intently while the new president addressed the nation.

Thompson, a 43-year-old Jamaican-American health worker from Plantation, Fla., saw the thrust of the new president's message as an appeal to Americans to ``realign our thinking patterns, buckle our shoes and move forward.''

Thompson said, for him personally, the meaning of watching a black man become president was ``the sky's the limit. And that's why I'm so elated.''

The war court was dark Tuesday afternoon in consideration of the inauguration.

But with no executive order from Obama, nor a directive from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the hearings would go forward on Wednesday, said Air Force Col. Peter Masciola, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel for Guantánamo trials.

That meant a 9 a.m. hearing for Khadr, who was captured at 15 and is now charged with murder as a war crime for allegedly throwing a grenade in July 2002 in a firefight in Afghanistan that killed Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M.

Human rights groups had appealed to Obama even before he took office to halt the Jan. 26 trial.

''President Obama should issue an executive order closing down Guantánamo and unconditionally and permanently shutting down the military commissions,'' said Jamil Dakwar, a court observer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

`SO MUCH AT STAKE'

''Americans and people the world over are waiting for the new president to act boldly,'' he said.

``Half-steps are not adequate when there is so much at stake in restoring our nation's commitment to the rule of law.''

Khadr, now 22, has grown into burly, bearded 6-foot-2 adulthood behind the razor wire of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to the consternation of children's rights advocates, who say he should have been treated as a ''child soldier'' -- not interrogated and imprisoned for years as a terror suspect.

Until Tuesday, the Khadr case was shaping up to be an early test of Obama's pledge to close the prison camps.

But, independently, Parrish decided to delay the trial to give defense and prosecution teams time to line up witnesses for pretrial motions on what evidence Khadr's jury of U.S. officers would hear at trial.

In response, the Pentagon scrapped plans to airlift a pool of U.S. military officers to this remote base this weekend to serve as jurors at Khadr's trial.

In parallel, absent a closure order from the new administration, the judge overseeing the Pentagon's Sept. 11 death-penalty trial had scheduled a hearing for Wednesday.

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