The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has abandoned plans to try several terrorists, including the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in civilian courts. Instead, it will use military tribunals to administer justice. It is a sad decision. The United States should be leading efforts to show that the fight against terrorism does not require sacrificing the very values that the West is defending. Instead, the Obama administration has been forced by political realities to compromise its position; we all are poorer for the result.

The government of then U.S. President George W. Bush set up special military commissions to administer justice to terror suspects arrested in its global war on terror. The administration and its defenders insisted that a special legal system was needed because the circumstances in which suspects were arrested and held, as well as the crimes which they were accused of, could not be accommodated by standard criminal procedures. In particular, there was concern that the way those suspects were treated - Mr. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who confessed to masterminding 9.11 was reportedly waterboarded 183 times; most people would call that torture, but that label was not used thanks to tortuous legal reasoning - would invalidate their confessions or taint their trials.

Candidate Obama pledged to shut down the military tribunals, to end the special legal treatment that, even without making a mockery of civilian law, undermined the credibility of Western support for the rule of law, and to close the facilities at Guantanamo Bay where terror suspects are held in legal limbo. In November 2009, Mr. Eric Holder, the attorney general, announced that Mr. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of organizing the Sept. 11 attacks would be tried in a civilian court just blocks from "Ground Zero" in New York City. Mr. Holder, with other administration officials, wanted to prove that the U.S. legal system could even handle crimes of this magnitude; a parallel legal system, one that did not afford defendants the protections of the U.S. Constitution, was not needed.