Experience is a hard teacher. Difficulties in trying and repatriating terrorism inmates at Guantanamo has required the Obama administration to revisit its policy of keeping detainees at the facility and placing them before military tribunals there.

The order reverses the administration's January 2009 freeze on new trials by military commission and bows to bipartisan congressional pressure against trying some of the detainees on U.S. soil. Exactly what to do with the 178 remaining detainees has been a problem that has vexed the administration.

The process it has created seems sensible. The administration has determined that about 48 of the inmates cannot be tried by either military commissions or civilian courts because such trials would either compromise U.S. intelligence sources or raise difficult questions about the methods used to obtain that information. Nevertheless, it has determined these inmates remain too dangerous to release.

So the administration has created an expanded review process in which the cases of these particular inmates would be examined by officials from the Defense and Justice departments, as well as from various intelligence agencies, to see if more information has come to light. The detainees could contest their status at these reviews.

The administration also said it would voluntarily acknowledge and incorporate some passages of international law relating to the treatment of prisoners.

That should ease some of the international criticism of the Guantanamo detentions.

Federal courts have determined that the United States, for its own protection, has the authority under the laws of war to hold these suspects, subject to some restrictions on how they are treated.

It should be remembered that they are considered to be unlawful combatants who have violated the rules of war themselves.

The Obama administration came into office vowing to close Guantanamo within a year.

Credit the administration with being pragmatic enough to deal with these facts and crafting a set of legal procedures to deal as reasonably as it can with a difficult situation.

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