The US Constitution divides the separation of powers between the three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. This worked well for over two hundred years until the worst president in US history declared the theory of the unitary executive, asserting that he had the power to do whatever Cheney told him to do. Republicans backed off that notion in short order, when Obama became President, but they would still reapportion the power to govern as they see fit.

The mixed verdict in the case of the first Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court on Wednesday quickly re-ignited a fierce debate over the Obama administration’s effort to restore the role of the traditional criminal justice system in handling terrorism prosecutions.

Ahmed Ghailani will face between 20 years and life in prison as a result of his conviction on one charge related to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. But because a jury acquitted him on more than 280 other charges — including every count of murder — critics of the Obama administration’s strategy on detainees said the verdict proved that civilian courts could not be trusted to handle the prosecution of Al Qaeda terrorists.

“This is a tragic wake-up call to the Obama Administration to immediately abandon its ill-advised plan to try Guantánamo terrorists” in federal civilian courts, said Representative Peter King, Republican of New York. “We must treat them as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantánamo.”

Adding political force of such criticism, Mr. King is set to become the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in January, and he promised to use oversight hearings to pressure the administration over its handling of terrorism trials.

Several other soon-to-be-powerful Republican lawmakers – including Lamar Smith of Texas, in the incoming Judiciary Committee chairman, and Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, the incoming chairman of the Intelligence Committee – made similar statements denouncing the use of civilian courts to prosecute terrorism cases.

Still, some proponents of using the regular court system rejected potrayals [sic] of the verdict as a disaster.

Among them, Mason Clutter, the counsel of the Rule of Law Program at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan non-profit group, said that Mr. Ghailani will serve a lengthy sentence and will have far fewer arguments to make in appealing his conviction than if he had faced a military trial.

“The system worked here,” she said. “I don’t think we judge success based on the number of convictions that were received. I think we judge success based on fair prosecutions consistent with the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Ms. Clutter also noted that most of the usual arguments that proponents of military tribunals make about the risk of civilian trials – like extreme security costs, grandstanding by the defendant, and the disclosure of classified information – did not happen in the Ghailani case.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said late Wednesday that his office would seek a life sentence for Mr. Ghailani… [emphasis added]