The anti-terrorism provisions approved by the Senate last week are so wrong on so many counts that it’s hard to decide where to start outlining the flaws.

These measures were included in a defense authorization bill that passed by a lopsided vote of 93 to 7, despite the legally dubious and practically unworkable aspects of the anti-terrorism provisions.

It’s obvious that when incumbents have to face congressional approval ratings comparable to the hat size of some members, they feel an overriding need to validate their credentials in the fight against terrorism by any means possible, no matter what the record shows to the contrary.

One provision would require that terrorism suspects be handled exclusively by the military, pushing yet another unsought responsibility onto uniformed men and women and robbing the federal courts of their proper role.

As a number of well-documented reports have made clear, federal courts have handled terrorism suspects with both greater effectiveness and greater efficiency than the creaky military commissions in Guantánamo. Only six cases have been brought by the military tribunal system since the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent opening of the detention facility in Cuba, but today the federal lockup system is holding 362 people in maximum security prisons — all convicted in terrorism-related cases.

Most of them are connected to international terrorism. That compares to 50 in 2000.

These cases are characterized by lengthy sentences. Incarceration — especially for Muslim convicts — takes place under harsher conditions than those faced by the general population. Among those who have been released, recidivism is rare, whereas about 25 percent of those released from Guantánamo are known or suspected of subsequent terrorist connections.

It’s cheaper, too. Suspects held in Cuba cost taxpayers $800,000 per year, whereas a federal inmate costs $28,000 a year. In short, the federal criminal justice system seems to be working, while the prison in Guantánamo doesn’t.

Those who care about civil liberties should be particularly alarmed by another provision that allows the military to detain terrorism suspects without charge, even U.S. citizens snatched on U.S. soil. Bye-bye due process, habeas corpus and all those other legal niceties that the Senate is prepared to do away with.

It’s worth recalling that alleged al Qaeda sleeper agent Ali al-Marri, the last alleged terrorist being held in a military prison in this country as an “enemy combatant,” eventually had to be charged and tried in the federal criminal system because the dangerous doctrine of executive power conceived by the Bush administration was deemed unlikely to pass judicial muster. Why revive it now?

A third provision bans the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo, thus handing a propaganda victory to America’s enemies for no good reason. As of this week, 171 prisoners are being held in that facility; 88 of them have been cleared for release, though they currently have nowhere to go.

Mr. Obama came into office promising to close Guantánamo but has faced intransigence from Congress. He should continue to insist that the facility must be closed. And if the defense bill passes with these odious provisions intact, he should exercise his veto. Discarding cherished civil liberties and forcing taxpayers to fund a prison that has outlived its usefulness is no way to keep Americans safe.