Terrorists Are criminals. Treat Them as Such.

President Barack Obama, having backed down from his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a federal courtroom in Manhattan, now is being pressured to back down entirely from his decision to try the accused 9/11 mastermind in any civilian court anywhere.

This would be a profound mistake, a craven admission that the U.S. system of justice and the rule of law can be manipulated by unreasoned fears and political opportunism.

The Great Accommodator must not accommodate this time. Nor should he give in to those in Congress who want him to back down from his decision to house terrorism suspects at the Thomson Correctional Center in northwest Illinois.

The president's timeline for closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, already has slipped. Every day it remains open deepens the stain it has left on American values.

The fundamental issue here is whether terrorism is a crime or an act of war, or something of a hybrid. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued a National Security directive giving the State Department the lead role in combatting international terrorism and the FBI the lead role on domestic terrorism.

Mr. Reagan appointed L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, later to become famous as U.S. proconsul in Iraq, as the State Department's point man. In 1987, Mr. Bremer made it clear:

"Terrorists are criminals. They commit criminal actions like murder, kidnapping and arson, and countries have laws to punish terrorists. A major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy's most potent tool, the rule of law, against them."

Once terrorists attacked U.S.

soil, anger and fear overrode reasoning. President George W. Bush declared war on terrorism; the Bush Justice Department used this as a rationale for doing just about anything anyone wanted to do with suspects, including torture, secret overseas prisons and establishing bogus military tribunals to try terrorists. Al-Qaida recruiting boomed.

The phrase "Global War on Terrorism" entered the Pentagon lexicon; they even struck a GWOT medal that they handed out by the hundreds of thousands. But in 2008, an influential study by the Rand Corp. said that "Police and intelligence agencies, rather than the military, should be the tip of the spear against al-Qaida in most of the world, and the United States should abandon the use of the phrase 'war on terrorism.'"

Mr. Obama now speaks of the "war on al-Qaida" and "Overseas Contingency Operations," not the war on terrorism.

That does not convince Republican leaders, who have found faux outrage to be an effective political tool. In the wake of the administration's decision to afford the alleged Christmas Day bomber the right to counsel, the GOP talking point became: "The Obama administration appears to have a blind spot when it comes to the war on terrorism."

On Tuesday, Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., with the support of Democratic Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, reintroduced a measure that would cut off funding for terrorist trials in federal courtrooms. "This whole criminalization of the war is really going to make us weaker and less safe," Mr. Graham told (naturally) Fox News on Tuesday evening.

The nation has spent eight years, 5,500 lives and a trillion dollars proving that's not true. It's time for Mr. Obama to let America be America.

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