Terrorists vs civilians

I'm trying to keep an open mind about this, but the more stuff I read, the more I think the decision to try terrorists in civilian courts is a bad idea. This piece is from Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe.

As defendants in federal court, the Al Qaeda prisoners will be entitled to the full panoply of due-process rights, including the right to discovery of all of the government’s information about them, where that information came from, and the methods by which it was obtained.
“Nothing results in more disclosures of government intelligence than civilian trials,’’ writes former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy. “They are a banquet of information, not just at the discovery stage but in the trial process itself, where witnesses - intelligence sources - must expose themselves and their secrets.’’
McCarthy should know. He was the prosecutor of Omar Abdel Rahman, the “blind sheikh’’ put on trial after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Though Rahman was eventually convicted and is serving a life sentence, the government was required to supply defense lawyers with sensitive intelligence details, including a list of 200 potential co-conspirators - people the government knew about, but didn’t have enough evidence to charge. Within days, those names had found their way to Sudan and were in the possession of bin Laden, an intelligence windfall that immeasurably aided his jihad against the United States.
No good can come from blurring the distinction between conventional crimes and acts of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates are enemies of the United States seized in wartime, not members of our society who have run afoul of our laws. It is easy to see what Al Qaeda gains from a New York trial: a powerful propaganda platform and the forced disclosure of American secrets. Pray it doesn’t take another 9/11 to remind Americans how much they stand to lose.