Tuesday afternoon, the Senate campaign of former U.S. Rep. Rob Simmons slammed the likely Democratic nominee, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, for what it called a "flip-flop" on the question of whether Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, should be tried in federal court or in the military tribunals set up outside the U.S. legal system during the Bush administration.

Blumenthal said Tuesday that he thought Mohammed should be tried in a military tribunal, after weeks of growing protest and concern from some politicians and commentators about the potential cost of added security and spectacle that would surround a trial in federal court in Manhattan (or, perhaps, New Haven).

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is quintessentially an enemy combatant, allegedly guilty of war crimes against civilians this country," Blumenthal told Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent. "He is a foreign national trained and directed by foreign terrorists and perhaps coordinated by foreign governments," Blumenthal argued. "He should be tried and convicted in a military tribunal."

Some, like New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr., whose city was named in rumors as a potential site for the federal trial if it is moved out of Manhattan, disagree. (Those rumors are "wildly inflated," Bass reported.) DeStefano's argument is in line with what U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in announcing plans to bring Mohammed to trial in court, rather than in a tribunal, which do not adhere to the same evidentiary and due process rules as U.S. courts, but which the Obama administration has also preserved as a venue for punishing those detained as enemy combatants. "... [F]ew of us, from what we know, have any doubt about what we'd like to see happen to them," DeStefano told the Independent in the same article. "The American legal system is capable of trying them successfully in a free and open courtroom in a transparent courtroom. That's what differentiates us from them. I don't think we should run away from that."

But the Simmons' campaign beef was different, seizing on Blumenthal's current position and the reflection of his previous stance in a column by Chris Powell of the Manchester Journal-Inquirer, to accuse the CT AG of backpedaling.

"Blumenthal did say forthrightly that he supports the war in Afghanistan and favors prosecuting domestic terrorism in regular rather than military courts," Powell wrote.

Now, I could be wrong, but I think I know where Powell got this forthright answer from Blumenthal. (Chris, if I'm wrong, please correct me.) I think it came on Face the State, I think I asked the question, and I think, especially after looking back at the tape, that Blumenthal didn't actually answer it as categorically as the Simmons campaign believes.

Here's the tape. Please note Dennis House's dapper suit, Powell's tough questioning and my poor posture. And right around the 15 minute mark, note the question about terrorist suspects and civilian vs. military trials. It's a (rambling) broad question, but part of the way I think Blumenthal wriggles out of it is that the two terrorists I mention are Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, the attempted Christmas Day airplane bomber, and Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber who was tried in federal court and sent to federal prison for a similar offense.

Blumenthal gives this answer about whether he supports using civilian courts or military tribunals:

"If there is a nexus between the crime and violations of domestic laws, they ought to be tried in United States courts. If there's apprehension abroad in the course of warfare, it presents a different situation. And each of these situations raises unique, factual circumstances that have to be reviewed very carefully and seriously before anybody makes a shoot-from-the-hip, snap judgment. And that approach, again, I think is important for any public official, whether it's a United States senator or anyone else."

The main import of this answer, of course, is that he did not quite answer the question, though it would be hard from his first declaration about the nexus of a crime and U.S. laws to see how he would be opposed to putting Abdulmutallab (or Reid) into the federal court system.

But what about Mohammed? Mohammed was apprehended abroad, has been a participant in what both Presidents Bush and Obama say is warfare, and thus perhaps he deserves to be considered, in Blumenthal's words, "a different situation."

I don't think Blumenthal committed to trying all terrorist suspects in federal courts, and he seems to have carved out a broad exception that would include Mohammed with the reference to those whose apprehension occurs overseas.

Of course, this is where the weird legal riddles of our current conflict start to get in the way: the conditions laid out in the first sentence also seem to fit Mohammed perfectly. Because there surely was a nexus between a crime - hijacking of airliners in U.S. airspace and mass murder - and the violation of U.S. laws on Sept. 11. But Mohammed was caught overseas, in what members of both political parties and two administrations say is a war zone. And a hijacker like Abdulmutallab would seem to fit our current national definition of enemy combatant (which is to say, our absence of one) as well over Michigan as he would have in the streets of Mosul.

Then of course there's the fact that Mohammed had already been indicted in federal court in Manhattan, way back in January 1996, for his role in Operation Bojinka, the failed plot to blow up 12 airliners over the ocean. What do you do with that indictment if you keep the guy out of the U.S. court system in favor of using military tribunals instead of courts? Nolle it?

Perhaps my tea-leaf reading makes Blumenthal's answer to this question sound a little more wriggly than it is. But perhaps not. And in any case, I think the Simmons campaign, eager to catch Blumenthal in a classic political flip-flop, is really going after the wrong question.

The real question for Blumenthal is whether the Obama administration is doing the right thing with Abdulmutallab (and, by the same token, whether the Bush administration was right to take the very same approach with Zacarias Moussaoui, who was indicted, convicted, and whose friends in Florence, Colo., now know him as #51427-054). You could put the same question to Holder. And to Obama. How come some of these guys deserve trials and some not? Is it the strength of our evidence? Is it the conduct of their jailers and its potential to derail a trial set to the existing rules? Are some terrorist attacks more warlike than others?

DeStefano has an answer for this. It's a different iteration of the answer that, for instance, Sen. John Kerry gave in 2004, helping to lose himself the presidency. That answer is that they're awful and we hate them but we will treat them like criminals, throw them in the dock, convict them in our way of justice, and throw them into prison (or, as DeStefano seems to suggest, the death chamber). The alternative view posits that these are creatures of war who deserve to be in an entirely separate system, absent certain defenses against government misconduct or coercion that are present in our domestic courts, but also secured out of what seems a genuine desire to prevent trials from becoming recruiting tools, just as other U.S. and coalition tactics, like drone strikes in Pakistan, have undoubtedly become.

Simmons, signing onto an idea from Glenn Sulmasy at the Coast Guard Academy, would set up a third way of sorts, creating designated "national security courts" to handle crimes like Abdulmutallab's, essentially formalizing the current procedural murk that has made the tribunals so controversial among many legal experts and even some politicians. (See Dodd, Christopher, circa late 2007's habeas-centric presidential run.)

The question for Simmons to ask Blumenthal is not about KSM, where the AG has left himself wiggle room, but whether he would see something different done with the attacker from Christmas Day or with Moussaoui. That is, what does his distinction between domestic "nexus" and "apprehension abroad" really mean, when successive administrations and countless officials have already told us that the current war zone has no boundaries. That's the slippery slope on which Blumenthal, like every candidate for office we've got, is struggling to find footing.