Today on Uncommon Knowledge, John Yoo, author of Crisis and Command and a former official in the Bush Justice Department. What does Yoo make of the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to dispose of five enemy combatants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, by submitting them to a criminal trial in New York City?

The Constitution requires that we have an open public trial for any criminal defendant tried by our government, and one of the rights that every defendant has is to force a government to open up its files and provide all the information it has on the defendant.This is going to be terrible for our efforts against al-Qaeda because we will have to explain, for example, how we knew where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, how we were able to intercept his cell phone calls, how we were able to read his e-mails, and how we captured him. All of this is going to have to be made public.

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