Since we have not made provisions for a national-security court to deal with the novel challenge of international terrorism, wartime alien enemy combatants should be tried by military commission in the safety of Guantanamo Bay -- which is what it was built for, at great expense to the American taxpayer.

Reports indicate that the administration thinks the challenge now is to find a new location in which to proceed with the same ill-advised civilian prosecution. Instead, the idea at this point should be to build a sensible strategy going forward: military commissions for now, and, ultimately, a new system for handling national-security cases. …

No opponent of civilian trials for enemy combatants is claiming that everyone who is connected in any way to a terrorism case should be transferred to the military courts. The quarrel here is over how to handle real operatives of al-Qaeda (and its components, like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula). We are talking about jihadists who are captured plotting, carrying out, or having carried out attacks against the United States — not just anyone who happens to get ensnared in the broad net of a terrorism investigation. …

Calling a prosecution “successful” just means that we convicted the defendant; it does not mean that national security was well served. If, because of civilian due-process rules, we had to reveal national-defense information that we could have kept secret in a military commission — or if we had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to address security concerns that could have been obviated by having a military trial in the safety of Gitmo — then the country would have been better off getting the same result in a military commission. That is common sense.

an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

In the war on terrorism, this country faces an enemy whose theory of warfare ends the hard-won distinction in modern thought between combatant and noncombatant. In doing that for which we have created government -- ensuring life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- how can we be adequately aggressive to ensure the first value, without unduly threatening the other two? This is hard. And people don't have to be lazy or stupid to get it wrong.

We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not "an isolated extremist." He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.

In the 50 minutes the FBI had to question him, agents reportedly got actionable intelligence. Good. But were there any experts on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the room (other than Abdulmutallab)? Was there anyone intimately familiar with any National Security Agency raw traffic to, from or about the captured terrorist? Did they have a list or photos of suspected recruits? …

There's a final oddity. In August, the government unveiled the HIG for questioning al-Qaeda and announced that the FBI would begin questioning CIA officers about the alleged abuses in the 2004 inspector general's report. They are apparently still getting organized for the al-Qaeda interrogations. But the interrogations of CIA personnel are well underway.

There were several factors that made the first 12 months of Obama's presidency better for peace prospects (for those of us who want a two-state solution) than previous years.

Firstly, there was less violence, both between Israelis and Palestinians, and between Palestinians and Palestinians, than there had been for years. Among other landmarks, 2009 was the first year in a long time without any successful suicide bombings against Israel.

In addition, the Palestinian security forces in the West Bank have finally started to behave like a security force rather than like a terrorist group. … Then, there was the strong economic growth in both Israel and the Palestinian territories relative to most of the rest of the world, for which 2009 was a bleak year. (While Gaza is not undergoing the same kind of economic growth enjoyed by the West Bank, the standard of living there is nonetheless considerably better than you would suppose from the distorted picture provided by certain partisan journalists and NGO workers, and much better than in many other areas of the world.)

And most importantly, 2009 was the year that a Likud Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not only recognized the principle of an independent Palestinian state, but also made the most sweeping freeze on Israeli settlement-building in the West Bank since 1967. …

[T]he Palestinian government in Ramallah, with quiet assistance from Israel … is finally doing some state-building instead of engaging in endless hollow "processing" involving talks about talks with foreign leaders. For a Palestinian state to be viable it is not just a question of what Israel might give the Palestinians, but of the Palestinians getting their own house in order.

And even if Mr. Obama isn't quite aware of this accomplishment, those of us who want to see a viable, independent and peaceful Palestinian state can only welcome it.

"Nearly a decade after September 11, 2001, one year after our original report, and one month after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the United States is failing to address several urgent threats, especially bioterrorism," said former senator Bob Graham, chair of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism.

The first step toward preventing a nuclear 9/11 is believing it could happen. …

Prior to 9/11, how unlikely was a megaterrorist attack on the American homeland? In the previous decade, al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000 had together killed almost 250 and injured nearly 6,000. Moreover, the organization was actively training thousands of recruits in camps in Afghanistan for future terrorist operations.

Thinking about risks we face today, we should reflect on the major conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission established to investigate that catastrophe. The U.S. national security establishment's principal failure prior to Sept. 11, 2001, was, the commission found, a "failure of imagination."

If Mr. Chavez were a right-wing leader or an ally of the United States, Latin American governments and many Democrats in Congress would be mobilizing to stop his latest abuse of power, and to encourage peaceful and democratic opposition. But he is not, and they are mostly silent. The Obama administration, too, has done next to nothing to defend democracy or encourage the opposition in Venezuela.

the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).

The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally, but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.

Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.

Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?

It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! …

Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.

From North Korea, he got missile and nuclear tests. From Iran, he got a contemptuous rejection of his extraordinary offer to enrich uranium for it. From Cuba, Fidel Castro said last month that "the empire's real intentions are obvious, this time beneath the kindly smile and African-American face of Barack Obama." From Venezuela, Hugo Chávez is now comparing Mr. Obama to the devil, a shtick he first tried out on George W. Bush back when liberals thought it was kind of funny. …

As for the Muslim world that Mr. Obama has been at such pains to court (the Cairo and Ankara speeches, his opposition to Gitmo and the war in Iraq, etc.), the 2009 Pew Global Survey that measures opinions about the U.S. finds as follows: Turkey, 14% favorable views of the U.S.; Palestinian territories, 15%; Pakistan, 16%; Jordan, 25%; Egypt, 27%. Granted, this is up slightly from the last year of the Bush administration, but only by a couple of percentage points on average. So that's the great Obama perception dividend? …

President Nicolas Sarkozy is asking Parliament for a "solemn declaration" that veiled women do not belong in France, followed by an outright legal ban. …

French Muslim intellectuals, activists, and community leaders who represent the promise of an enlightened European Islam are asking for an unambiguous ban on the niqab. Poet and scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb calls the niqab the "ideological sign of radical Islam." Psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama exposes the "masochism" of the self-imposed veil, "unacceptable even in the name of individual freedom." …

Democracy means individual responsibility, which means showing our faces. ….

In a democracy the individual enjoys civil rights and accepts individual civil responsibility. This is why we show our faces, sign our names, look each other in the eyes. Moreover, integration into French society has always meant assimilation. The French do not want to follow what they see as the Anglo-Saxon model of juxtaposed ethnic ghettoes. Immigrants who master the French language, codes, style, tastes, and flair are sincerely accepted and flourish here. Today, the personal success stories of French Muslims could be swept away by a rising wave of radicalization. …

The stakes are high and the debate could turn into a battlefield. Hassen Chalgoumi, the Imam of Drancy -- known for his outreach to Christians and Jews -- announced he is in favor of a ban on the niqab, which he calls "a prison for women, a tool of sexist domination and Islamist proselytism… incompatible with life in society." A few days later a "commando" of 80 men burst into Chalgouni's mosque and threatened to get rid of "the imam of the Jews."

What do Haiti and Afghanistan have in common, other than the presence of our military? They're both profoundly failed states that we pretend just need the right encouragement. …

We just can't think past the Western model of what a state should be. As long as there's one midlevel bureaucrat with a working cellphone in Country X, we insist there's a functioning government.

In the ninth year of a war, we still don't want to know why the other guy fights.

The assumption … is that three-quarters of the Taliban fight for money or because of small-time grievances. There's zero serious data behind that belief. The assumption suits us, so we rig the intel.

After almost a decade of open warfare with Islamist militants, thousands of global terror attacks in the name of Allah and even deadly Muslim turncoats in our military, we continue to deny that our enemies might be fighting for their faith -- or, in the Taliban's case, for faith, tribe, tradition and territory.

Nope, we're convinced it's about the lack of jobs. Well, sorry -- the Taliban aren't the Teamsters.

growing recognition, especially within the U.S. military, that America has to get out of the business of fighting expeditionary wars every time a new flash point erupts with al-Qaeda. The Pentagon has adopted this proxy strategy of training "friendly" countries (meaning ones that share with us the enemy of Islamic extremism) from North Africa to the Philippines.

This "partnership" approach hasn't been articulated by the Obama administration as a formal strategy, and it doesn't get much media coverage. But it's worth a careful look, because it may offer the best path toward a world where the United States isn't always operating as an anti-terrorist Robocop.

The essence of this strategy is to train other countries to fight Islamic extremism that threatens them at least as much as us. As a senior military officer says: "We can't possibly go everywhere that al-Qaeda metastasizes. The idea is to build capacity for foreign militaries to deal with problems inside their borders."

Yemen offers the clearest example of how this "partnering" can work -- and how it differs from the direct combat the United States waged in Iraq and Afghanistan.