The Washington Post article that Dan posted about last night is a head fake. President Obama is not caving on military commissions. He has already caved on them: He failed (thankfully) to abolish them, Congress enacted legislation endorsing them again in 2009, and the administration has already directed a commission trial for the Cole bombers.

The real agenda here is to close Gitmo. That’s the ball to keep your eye on. The Post is trying to soften the opposition to shuttering the detention camp by portraying beleaguered, reasonable Obama as making a great compromise that will exasperate the Left. The idea is to strengthen Sen. Lindsey Graham’s hand in seeking reciprocal compromise from our side.

This, however, is a matter of national security, not horse-trading over a highway bill. You don’t agree to do a stupid thing that endangers the country just because your opposition has magnanimously come off its insistence that you do two stupid things that endanger the country.

If a deal to grant military commissions in exchange for closing Gitmo happens, it is a major win for the Obama Left and an enormous loss for public safety.

We were headed inexorably toward military commissions for the 9/11 plotters. We don’t need to cut a bad deal to get it. Congress was not going to approve funding to transport trained terrorists to the U.S., nor to hold civilian trials. As I said, we’ve already got military commissions for some enemy combatants, and if we play this out, we are likely to get them for most if not all of the combatant war crimes trials. And we are likely to get them at Gitmo — the best place to have them, and the place on which the public has expended hundreds of millions of dollars to construct a safe, humane, fastidiously Islamo-friendly prison with state-of-the-art trial facilities.

Military commissions didn’t exist when the jihadists carried out the Cole attack in October 2000. For years, moreover, there has been a pending civilian indictment in the Cole case. Yet, despite these facts, the Obama administration called for a military commission for the Cole bombers. Once they did that, there was no longer any coherent rationale for giving the 9/11 plotters a civilian trial. The only predicate for trying the Cole bombers by commission is the 9/11 attacks — so how do you do the 9/11 plotters in civilian court if the Cole bombers have to go to military court?

Furthermore, the public strongly opposes a civilian trial for the 9/11 plotters. There is only so much an administration can do against the will of the American people. Obama is pushing that envelope as far as it can go on health care. He was not going to go over the edge just to give KSM a civilian trial. The president would have caved on this no matter what.

In sum, we were winning the argument. But instead, in Gang of 14 style, Senator Graham and whoever else are treating the president like he has cards to play. Rather than just be quietly embarrassed over their loopy position that Gitmo causes terrorism, these senators are using that fiction as a reason for trading away Gitmo (i.e., a facility we need) in order to achieve military commission trials for enemy combatants (i.e., something we’d get anyway without the trade).

Senator Graham and others will tell you such an outcome will be a great victory for national security conservatives who think terrorists should be tried by commission. Don’t buy it. The deal would be a great victory for the terrorists. As I argued here, it would significantly increase the threat to U.S. military bases and geometrically increase the likelihood that federal judges will order that trained terrorists be released in the United States. There is no excuse for taking on these risks given that Gitmo is a top-flight, completely secure facility. It makes no sense to horse-trade when Obama was being pushed toward military commissions by reality.

Proponents will call frame the compromise floated by the Post as a triumph for bipartisanship. In reality, it will be a defeat for national defense.