In a recent New York Times op-ed, journalist Michael Kinsley suggests a system for deciding how to try people like the alleged Christmas Day underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Mr. Kinsley suggests that our national border is the "bright line" that alone should determine whether suspects like Mr. Abdulmutallab are tried in U.S. criminal courts or in military courts. He argues that people captured within the U.S., regardless of their citizenship status, should be tried in U.S. courts with the same rights as U.S. citizens. People captured outside of our borders may be tried in the military tribunals designed to adjudicate enemy combatants during wartime.

What's more disturbing than the opinions of a columnist is that the Obama administration considers this issue to require only a simple judgment call -- thus completely ignoring the U.S. Constitution, which clearly sets forth in its Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments the rights of U.S. citizens in criminal matters. Supreme Court decisions have expanded those basic rights, and they now include the right to speak to a lawyer before speaking to the authorities, the right to free counsel if the individual in question cannot afford one, and the right to remain silent during interrogation. If the authorities fail to state those rights or violate them during and after apprehension, the accused may be found not guilty on the basis that those rights were denied. We all know from countless movies and television programs how the reading of those rights is performed -- and it's intuitively clear that they were never intended by the Supreme Court to be followed by the military when they apprehend someone in combat.

A foreign national apprehended in the act of trying to blow up a U.S. commercial jetliner bound for an American city in the name of radical Islam and under the auspices of al-Qaeda should not be given the unique legal rights of an American citizen, no matter where the attempted attack occurred. And because Mr. Abdulmutallab wasn't wearing a military uniform signifying his allegiance to a particular country or military organization, he's not even entitled to prisoner-of-war status or any rights under the Geneva Conventions. During the Second World War, German enemies captured within U.S. borders were executed without trial, and the Supreme Court later upheld such executions as completely constitutional.

This administration has categorically failed at distinguishing between acts of war and common crimes. It should not be our national boundary, as Mr. Kinsley suggests, that determines who receives full access to the American court system; it should be the citizenship of the accused. U.S. citizens are tried in U.S. courts under U.S. laws. Noncitizens like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Mr. Abdulmutallab should be tried by U.S. military commissions, as established by the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force passed by Congress on Sept. 18, 2001. The military courts offer abundant rights and protections to the accused, but those protections are consistent with the status of those accused: combatants whose citizenship is elsewhere than the United States and whose act in question is directed against the United States as an act of war or an attempted act of war.

In a Nov. 9 letter to President Barack Obama, an organization opposed to trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cohorts in American courts, 9/11 Families for a Safe and Strong America, stated that "The public has a right to know that prosecuting the 9/11 conspirators in federal courts will result in a plethora of legal and procedural problems that will severely limit or even jeopardize the successful prosecution of their cases."

If they could see us now, the framers of our Constitution would be simply dumbfounded to see how their straightforward document had been so egregiously twisted, and by no less an authority than the president of the United States and his Justice Department.

Colin Hanna is president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative think tank. His e-mail is colin@lfrusa.com.