Sen. Ben Nelson was good enough to get in touch with me this morning about this post from yesterday, in which I pointed to him as an example of what I called the Democrats’ general incoherence on Guantánamo Bay. I was drawing on his appearance, with Senator Kyl, on Fox News Sunday. (Fox has published a transcript, here.) Senator Nelson makes the very fair point that having a disagreement with me does not make a person incoherent. I still think he’s wrong, but I shouldn’t have implied that his position was not just wrong but insensible. So I withdraw, with regret, the claim that he was incoherent.

For what it’s worth, I believe after speaking with him that our disagreement is more narrow than it originally seemed. Senator Nelson doesn’t want hundreds of trained terrorists brought to the United States, and neither do I. He wants us to work with other countries to make sure that detainees who should remain incarcerated do remain incarcerated when we transfer them to those countries. I agree with that, too. Senator Nelson seems to have more confidence than I do that the receiving countries will honor agreements to keep detainees incarcerated, and I would be more wary than I suspect he would be about transfers.

Where we disagree, though, is with respect to the small-but-important category of detainees facing war-crimes commissions. Currently, there are 21 of these prisoners, which is less than 10 percent of the remaining Gitmo detainee population (and less than 3 percent of the total detainee population we have ever had at Gitmo, which peaked at a little less than 800). These are theoretically the worst terrorists — those we commit ourselves to try, despite the downsides of trials, because we don’t want to be in a position of having to release them once hostilities wind down — even if that turns out to be many years from now. We want those terrorists convicted of war crimes so we can sentence them to death or to life imprisonment (or something close to it).

Senator Nelson would be open to transferring them to other countries once we’ve convicted and sentenced them, on the theory that we could trust the other countries to make them serve their sentences. I, on the other hand, would not transfer convicted war criminals to other countries; I would insist that they serve their sentences under unilateral U.S. supervision. It does not make sense to me (though, again, I shouldn’t have used the word “incoherent”) to go through the burden of indicting and trying these heinous prisoners unless we are committed to either executing them or detaining them permanently. I would prefer that they not serve their sentences in a domestic U.S. prison — if it were up to me, Gitmo would remain open. But if Gitmo were closed and we had no offshore option, I would keep those detainees incarcerated in U.S. prisons rather than release them to other countries. That would be the only way I could be sure they’d never get out.

To be clear, I am not talking about bringing hundreds of terrorists into the U.S., and I think it would be better to keep Gitmo open so we didn’t have to incarcerate any War on Terror captives in the U.S. But with respect to the small subset of convicted war criminals, if my only two choices were assured incarceration in the U.S. or transfer for hoped-for incarceration in a foreign country, I would choose the former because the risks to national security would be less severe.

I’m grateful to Senator Nelson for taking the time to elaborate on his views, and I hope I’ve done them more justice than I did yesterday.