No, they really don’t, these members of the current majority festering in Congress. Anytime any opportunity arises where they have the chance to sabotage our economy, our freedom of speech or our security in the name of liberal quagmirism, they’re wide awake and on it with a vengeance.

The Senate rejected a move Thursday to block the Obama administration from using ordinary federal courts to prosecute those alleged to have plotted the Sept. 11 attacks.

On a 54-45 vote, the Senate tabled an amendment from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) that would have left military commissions as the only option for prosecuting Sept. 11 suspects.

All 40 Republicans supported the amendment, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and four Democrats: Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) and Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

Graham said the measure, offered as an amendment to the annual appropriations bill for the Commerce and Justice Departments, was needed to head off what he said were plans by the Obama administration to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others allegedly involved in the Sept. 11 plot to trials before civilian courts in the U.S.

Of course, we were expecting something like that, the left having discussed it for a long time, often with comparisons of the gulag and Nazi death camps when referring to the Camp Delta incarceration facility at Guantanamo Bay, the feeble argument that these Butchers For Allah are mere felons, not captured prisoners in a war between civilizations we did not start, but to now see that they’ve actually done it, well, is nevertheless disconcerting.

The more sensible among our leaders, mostly Republicans, were, rightly, completely for the bill.

“These people are not criminals. They’re warriors — and they need to be dealt with in a legal system that recognizes that,” Graham said. “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not rob a liquor store.”

“The attacks of 9/11 were not a crime. They were a war crime,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said.

Some Democrats flatly disagreed, arguing that military trials could play into the Al Qaeda operatives’ claims that they are fighters in a holy war against America.

“They are criminals. They committed murder,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. “These are not holy warriors. They are criminals.”

Here, here!

Jim Webb, one of the few smart Democrats present:

“I have consistently argued that the appropriate venue for trying perpetrators of international terrorism who are in fact enemy combatants is a military tribunal,” Webb said. He said federal court procedures for turning over evidence to defense lawyers and for calling military and intelligence agency witnesses “could lead to the exposure of classified materials.”

My emphasis, there, and the man said a mouthful.

Regular court procedures would require the prosecution to produce evidence that might consist of disclosure of methods, means and personnel we can’t afford to have the enemy read about in the New York Times.

Then again, that precedent was already set back when the NYT was printing the details of Bush terrorist surveillance strategies, so I don’t suppose it would be anything new.

Webb also indicated he was concerned that a terror suspect sent to federal court could be released in the U.S. if he was found not guilty.

Fancy that!

The whole story is here.