Let’s imagine we’ve captured a highly trained terrorist al-Qaeda was attempting to embed in the United States, à la Mohamed Atta and company, to carry out mass-murder attacks in American cities. For eight years, our national-security debate in the United States has been divided into two camps on these cases.

In the first are those who accept the post-9/11 law-of-war paradigm. They would have that enemy combatant detained for intelligence purposes (and to remove him from the battlefield) until he could be tried for war crimes by a military commission, and then either executed or imprisoned for life. In the second are those who uphold the pre-9/11 law-enforcement paradigm. They would have that criminal defendant prosecuted in an ordinary civilian court, and correctly observe that federal courts have a strong track record of producing convictions and imposing adhesive sentences, at least for the tiny proportion of terrorists who have been tried in them.

Each of these philosophies has benefits. The law-of-war approach prioritizes intelligence-gathering and national security, while the law-enforcement approach ensures legal outcomes whose integrity is beyond reproach. Both have downsides. Foreign allies whose cooperation we need (because it is within their territories that most jihadists operate) won’t extradite captured terrorists to military tribunals, because they object to the tribunals’ lack of independent judicial oversight. But the due-process standards that apply in civilian judicial proceedings provide a trove of intelligence for enemies plotting to kill Americans. Consequently, there have been calls for a third way: a new legal paradigm that borrows the best of both worlds, specially designed for this novel security challenge, which is more like a war than a crime but different in many significant ways from a conventional war.

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Here’s the problem: The hypothetical suggested in the opening paragraph, is not hypothethical: It is the real case of a real jihadist, an Ethiopian named Binyam Mohammed. And, rejecting both military and civilian justice, the Obama administration has come up with its own third way: releasing him.

Mohammed is an Ethiopian-born jihadist. As terrorism researcher Thomas Joscelyn has documented (see here and here), he joined al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and met personally with Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda figures. He received extensive, sophisticated terrorist training. In 2002, when he was finally apprehended in Pakistan, he was almost certainly en route to the United States to conduct attacks with José Padilla (who has since been convicted of terrorism offenses). Padilla is notorious as the alleged “dirty bomber” because he — along with the lesser known Mohammed — studied the possibility of constructing and detonating a radiological bomb in an American city. As Joscelyn recounts, Mohammed and Padilla “explored a wide range of possible targets and modes of attack, from striking U.S. subways to setting apartment buildings on fire using ordinary gas lines.”

In a more rational time, these facts would be on the tip of every American tongue. But these are not rational times. In the unlikely event you’ve heard of Binyam Mohammed at all, it is because of defense lawyers and human-rights activists. The media, uninterested in what he had in store for the United States, emphasizes in its limited coverage the fact that, upon capture, Mohammed was subjected to the practice known as “extraordinary rendition.” That is, he was handed over by Western intelligence services to authorities in a country less fastidious about civil rights — in this case, Morocco — where, he claims, he was tortured. From there, he was eventually transferred to American custody and detained for several years at Guantanamo Bay.