Lindsey Graham (SC), Susan Collins (ME), and of course John McCain (AZ), joined with Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner (VA) to push through terror-detainee legislation that President Bush has promised to reject.

The president’s measure would go further than the Senate package in allowing classified evidence to be withheld from defendants in terror trials, using coerced testimony and protecting U.S. interrogators against prosecution for using methods that violate the Geneva Conventions.

So, of course they side with the democrats and go with the weaker senate package.

I agree with this assesment by Kim Priestap writing at Wizbang:

The business of protecting the American people from terrorist attacks involves taking a very tough stance against terrorists, and allowing our national security secrets to be viewed by terrorists who are being tried for conspiring to kill us en mass is simply foolhardy. These terrorists will get that information to their cohorts who will then use it to their advantage. We can’t allow our judicial process to become a weapon that can be used against us.

I am utterly sick of hearing the argument that these enemy combatants are in any way deserving of Geneva Convention protections. Andrew McCarthy echos my thoughts:

Let’s not mince words here: Our soldiers, if captured by Islamic terrorists, will be tortured and killed. That’s what Islamic terrorists do. That’s why awed admiration is the only proper response to the bravery of our men and women in uniform. They fight for us despite knowing, as we should all by now know, that nothing we do affects the jihadists’ behavior.

On the other hand, if we were to fight another conventional war against the honorable combatants of a nation-state, that country’s forces — like our own — would be solemnly bound to (as well as self-interested in) compliance with their Geneva Convention obligations regarding prisoners of war. Again, how we deal with al Qaeda now is irrelevant to the treatment our forces will receive in any future conflict.

So, no, we don’t owe jihadists the same trial rights we owe any honorable combatants, much less our own troops. The very notion is an insult to those putting their lives on the line in our defense. That aside, though, the incentives these senators would create are perverse. It is an elementary rule of human nature that when behavior is rewarded, it begets more of the same. Rewarding terrorists with rights to which they have no legal entitlement can only encourage their methods — a cost McCain, Graham, and Warner would apparently have us bear despite the absence of any discernible benefit.

Outrageous.