On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a complex opinion rebuking much of the Bush administration's legal response to the 9/11 attacks. The court ruled that al-Qaeda detainees were entitled to at least a modicum of protection under the Geneva conventions--and that the President needed Congress' approval before sending detainees to military tribunals for trial and punishment.

Resident Fellow David Frum

The high court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is being reported as a defeat for the Bush administration, and so it is. But that same decision opens the way to an important and useful debate over counter-terrorism policy--and that is a debate the administration can and should win.

It's symbolically interesting that the Hamdan decision was handed down in the same week that The New York Times triggered a national uproar by exposing details of a U.S. Treasury department program to track terrorist finances around the world. (Two other papers also published the story, but in a less culpable way: Once the Treasury realized that the Times was determined to proceed, it briefed other news organizations itself in order to ensure that the facts were presented accurately and unsensationally.)

The Times' terrorism-financing story followed two other intensely damaging leaks: One to the Times disclosed details of the National Security Agency's program for intercepting terrorist communications; another to the Washington Post disclosed the locations of the prisons where high-value al-Qaeda captives were held for questioning.

Altogether, these three stories helped al-Qaeda to transfer money more securely, to conceal its communications more effectively, and to identify potential targets for terrorist retaliation and blackmail. Short of printing coupons to offer terrorists discounts on their next purchase of a nuclear device, it's hard to imagine how a media organization could provide more assistance to the terrorist enemy than these stories in the Times and Post have done.

The divulgence of crucial national secrets has elicited remarkably little outrage from Democrats in Congress. Few have stepped forward to defend the Times or the civil servants who leaked to it, but almost none has condemned the leak, either.

Now the Hamdan decision--and the resulting urgent need for new anti-terrorist legislation--forces a decision upon Congress and the Democratic minority. Where do they stand? What will they support?

This is more than merely a partisan question. It goes directly to the question of whether the U.S. and the West will be able to combat terrorism as united societies--or whether their left wings will opt out, or balk, or worse.

Since 9/11, Western counter-terrorism has achieved an impressive record of success. Outside the Middle East, terrorists have inflicted only two major attacks in five years: Madrid in 2004, London in 2005. Yet this very success is now under attack.

In Britain, courts have again and again attacked that country's security laws: Last week, Labour MP John Denham charged that the U.K. courts' relentless opposition to security measures threatened a "constitutional crisis." In the U.S., at least one major leak--the NSA story--has apparently been traced back to a Clinton appointee to the senior civil service. In Canada, we are already seeing signs that liberal opinion, which tolerated counter-terrorism when practiced by a Liberal government, may soon go into opposition against exactly the same measures when implemented by conservatives.

Last month, the Pew Foundation (Pewglobal.org) released its latest survey of worldwide Islamic opinion. Some of the results are very encouraging: Very large majorities of Muslims worldwide express no confidence in Osama bin Laden, and most Western Muslims condemn suicide bombing. But the survey also makes clear that Muslim populations in both the Middle East and the West remain profoundly alienated: Even now, large majorities of Muslims, not just in the Middle East but in Britain, France and Germany, refuse to believe that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Arab terrorists. Attempts to change Muslim minds through public information campaigns like that headed by Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes are going precisely nowhere.

It may be that Muslim attitudes will eventually soften. I expect they will. But it looks likely that this process will take a long time--and that it will be led by insiders, not imposed by outsiders.

But if outsiders cannot hope to persuade alienated Muslims away from radicalism, they must--they cannot avoid--taking measures to protect themselves from that radicalism. Yet these measures are strenuously opposed by the press and the courts--and, in the U.S., even illegally subverted by political antagonists within the government.

Have we reached the point where the greatest threat to the lives and safety of civilian populations may be--not the increasingly clumsy operations of the terrorists--but sabotage by internal opponents of counter-terrorist operations?

David Frum is a resident scholar at AEI.